Over the last three decades, there has been a substantial shift in financial market policy towards the promotion of financial liberalization. Policy makers around the globe have been preoccupied with deregulating interest rates, lifting restrictions on bank portfolios and enticing competition in financial services. Financial deregulation is typically accompanied with a change in the system of prudential regulation.
This paper investigates the relationship between economic and social development. Contrary to the view of those who believe in the existence of a tradeoff between democracy and growth, the paper contends that consensus-building, open dialog and the promotion of an active civil society are key ingredients to long-term sustainable development. Development is a participatory process. "Best practices" or reforms that are imposed on a country through conditionality may very well fail to produce lasting change.
Much has been learned about emerging markets finance over the past 20 years. These markets have attracted a unique interdisciplinary interest that bridges both investment and corporate finance with international economics, development economics, law, demographics, and political science. Our paper focuses on the research areas that are ripe for exploration.
Regulatory changes that appear comprehensive will have little impact on the functioning of a developing market if they fail to lead to foreign portfolio inflows. We specify a reduced-form model for a number of financial time series and search for a common, endogenous break in the data generating process. We also estimate a confidence interval for the break. Our endogenous break dates are accurately estimated but do not always correspond closely to dates of official capital market reforms.
We study the interrelationship between capital flows, returns, dividend yields and world interest rates in 20 emerging markets. We estimate a vector autoregression with these variables to measure the degree to which lower interest rates contribute to increased capital flows and shocks in flows affect the cost of capital among other dynamic relations. We precede the VAR analysis by a detailed examination of endogenous break points in capital flows and the other variables. These structural breaks are traced to the liberalization of emerging equity markets.
The Great Divide in economic and financial development and the convergence in financial architecture among the successful countries raise fundamental questions about how financial development interacts with economic growth. Is it possible to engineer a development takeoff by creating a modern financial architecture from scratch? Or are financial institutions and markets a reflection of underlying conditions in the real sector? Or are both financial development and economic growth driven by some other underlying variables?
The authors propose that cultural frame shifting — shifting between two culturally based interpretative lenses in response to cultural cues — is moderated by perceived compatibility (vs. opposition) between the two cultural orientations, or bicultural identity integration (BII).
The authors urge that modern strategic theory is robust and provides a solid foundation for legal policy. The striking breakthrough of strategic theory was to establish that predatory pricing can be rational economic behavior.
This paper examines agency as a mechanism that can predict cultural differences in human motivation. In elaborating on the theory of self-construal (Markus and Kitayama, 1991) and drawing on past research on culture, we propose that people from cultures stressing independence are more personally agentic, whereas people from cultures stressing interdependence are more collectively agentic?which results in culturally contrasting differences in cognition and human motivation.