This article challenges evolutionary accounts of property transformation in postcommunist Hungary, which hold that novel property forms based on interenterprise ownership have emerged in that country. It shows that private property has emerged as the predominant category of ownership in Hungary and explains the rapid diffusion of private ownership by focusing on the actions of the state and int...

Colonialism acts as an incubator of genocidal violence due to factors such as severe human rights violations and political oppression marked by Western capitalism and neocolonialism. Traces of colonial ideologies are found in the approaches or discourses of organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. The criticisms of acclaimed theorists such as Gé...

The entry of multinational banks (MNBs) into the developing and transition economies is expected to create more market discipline for domestic banks, thus making them more efficient and enhancing financial stability. But is this the case? Using data from the Bank for International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund, I first try to determine which factors tend to increase MNB lendin...

Over the past decade, 14 countries have undertaken a total of 18 debt restructurings. Concerns surrounding some of these restructurings have led policymakers and capital market participants to review their policies and practices on restructuring sovereign debt. in particular, court rulings as a result of litigation against Argentina have raised fears that a small minority of creditors could blo...

— We study the role of the exchange rate regime, reserve accumulation, and sterilization policies in the macroeconomics of aid surges. Absent sterilization, a peg allows for almost full aid absorption—an increase in the current account deficit net of aid—delivering the same effects as those of a flexible regime but with a necessary increase in inflation. Regardless of the regime, policies that ...

This paper shows that in American states balanced budget rules are effective in enforcing fiscal discipline but they have no costs in terms of increased output variability. More specifically, we show that tighter fiscal rules are associated with larger average surplus and lower cyclical variability of the budget balance. However, the lower flexibility of the budget balance does not affect state...

The recent crisis has highlighted the need for a “macroprudential policy” ensuring financial stability. One of the key aspects of this forthcoming macroprudential policy is the setting of bank capital requirements conditionally on the state of the economy—what the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (2010) calls the “countercyclical capital buffer.” This raises the issue of the interactions ...

How do governments allocate the burden of adjustment reform programs sponsored by international financial institutions? While political economy literature is ripe with theoretical arguments about this issue, we have a limited empirical understanding distributional effects these programs, except for few informative case studies. We argue that burdens strategically to protect their own partisan s...