This paper examines the effect of FDI activity on manufacturing exports in four MENA countries. The sensitivity of manufacturing exports and the share in manufacturing exports in total exports to two measures of FDI activity is tested. The findings of this analysis suggest that FDI activity may have a positive effect on the host country’s manufacturing exports. The magnitude of the effect howev...

The aim of this paper is to make a first step towards studying the role of social expenditure and its interaction with corporate taxation in determining the destination of foreign direct investment (FDI) flows. Using panel data for 18 OECD countries and measuring the extent of social welfare policies by the (public social expenditure)/GDP ratio, we find strong support for the conjecture that re...

In the current age of trade and financial openness, local economies in developing countries are becoming increasingly exposed to external investments. The objective of the proposed two-sector model with environmental externalities is to provide an insight into the interaction between external investors and local communities with a focus upon the different strategies and income sources available...

It is often argued that multinationals are reluctant to transfer technology due to the fear of spillovers. We show that this need not be the case if host country policies like taxation are taken into account. Furthermore, we examine the incentives the multinational and the host country have to engage in an international joint venture. We show why a multinational may agree to enter a joint ventu...

Available online 18 October 2014 Extant literature suggests that bank monitoring improves corporate governance. This paper demonstrates that inefficiency in banking can also significantly reduce the equity capital markets' disciplinary power. Specifically, we show that in an environment in which the banking system is dominated by inefficient state-owned banks, controlling shareholders' tunnelin...

This paper presents a joint analysis of the term structure of credit default swap (CDS) spreads and the implied volatility surface. The rapid development of the CDS market has provided convenient products to extract credit risk, and its interaction with equity volatility has been analyzed in many studies. However, in most of them the 5-year credit default swap spread is used to measure credit r...

This paper analyzes—both empirically and theoretically—how fluctuations in uncertainty interact with financial market imperfections in determining economic outcomes. In a standard bond-contracting framework, an increase in uncertainty benefits equity holders at the expense of bondholders, and to the extent that firms face significant frictions in financial markets, increased uncertainty implies...

I investigate empirically the ability of financial market incompleteness to help explaining the equity premium puzzle. I estimate the non-diversifiable component of the cross-sectional volatility of income and examine its cyclical properties. Equipped with these estimates, I compute the implied equilibrium Sharpe-ratio of excess returns and evaluate the ability of idiosyncratic risk to improve ...

This paper establishes the link of microstructure and macroeconomic factors with the timevarying conditional correlation of foreign exchange and excess equity returns. By using the proposed DCC model with exogenous variables, capital flows and interest rate differentials are shown to be significant determinants of this correlation which is inclusive of the short-run variation of both asset retu...

In the last decade we have seen a significant change in the composition of capital flows to developed as well as to developing countries. In this paper we investigate empirically the links between the volatility of monetary macroeconomic aggregates, as a measure of country specific measure of relative risk, and the structure of external liabilities in developed and developing countries. We esti...