The large and widening gap between economic performance in Eastern European transition economies and those of the former Soviet Union has been dubbed “the Great Divide” by Berglof and Bolton (2002). This paper provides a rationale for the gap based upon the concept of financial repression. The magnified effects of transition to the market can be attributed to the government manipulation of fina...

Developing fraud management policies and fraud detection systems is a vital capability for financial institutions towards minimising the effect of fraud upon customer service delivery, bottom line financial losses and the adverse impact on the organisation’s brand image reputation. Rapidly changing attacks in real-time financial service platforms continue to demonstrate fraudster’s ability to a...

This paper discusses conventional and unconventional monetary policies in a dynamic small open economy model with financial frictions. In the model, financial intermediaries or banks borrow from the world market and lend to domestic households. The external debt of banks is limited by a multiple of their equity; in turn, households hold equity in banks subject to a limit, reflecting domestic fr...

Wage Policies of a Russian Firm and the Financial Crisis of 1998: Evidence from Personnel Data – 1997 to 2002 We use a rich personnel data set from a Russian firm for the years 1997 to 2002 to analyze how the financial crisis in 1998 and the resulting change in external labor market conditions affect the wages and the welfare of workers inside a firm. We provide evidence that large shocks to ex...

In a recent editorial in Biostatistics, Peng (2009) introduced a system for making data and computer code from papers in the journal publicly available so that other researchers can reproduce the statistical analyses in the paper. The editors explain in a short accompanying note (Diggle and Zeger, 2009) that ‘we wish to encourage the practice of making research published in the journal reproduc...

This article argues that the existing maze of pesticide policies reflects the multidimensionality of side effects of pesticide use that cannot be addressed by uniform policies. Pesticide policies will improve as (a) economic literacy among natural scientists and policymakers increases; (b) economic models of pesticide use and agricultural production in general better incorporate biological cons...

This paper identifies policies that prevent financial instability and excessive risktaking while taking into account banks’ endogenous portfolio choice and default decision. Although direct asset restrictions or market concentration can eliminate the potential for a high default risk and risk-shifting, these policies harm social welfare. Transparent banking can deregulate these policies; howeve...

the relationship between financial development and economic growth in order to give priority to policies that will lead to financial development or addressing other economic priorities to achieve economic growth has attracted the attention of many economics. nonlinear models of causality and causal relationships between variables in the modification of variables in different regimes exist, why ...

Distributional consequences typically receive limited attention in economic models that analyze the effects of monetary and financial sector policies. These consequences deserve more attention as financial markets are incomplete, imperfect, and economic agents’ access to them is often limited. This limits households’ ability to insure against household-specific (or sector-specific) shocks and m...

Emerging digital financial services use mobile phones to provide access to populations traditionally excluded from the global economy. These “mobile money” services have proven extremely successful in their first ten years of deployment, and provide a powerful means of raising people out of poverty. Such services have access to a wealth of customer information, potentially including entire purc...