In this paper, an examination is made of the linkage between foreign direct investment and productivity in eight East Asian economies–China, Hong Kong SAR, Indonesia, Malaysia, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Taiwan Province of China and Thailand. The Granger causality test and the Toda-Yamamoto version of the Granger causality test are used to test if inflows of foreign direct investment “cause”...

In this paper I analyze the impact of increasing government infrastructure investment by using existing large foreign exchange reserves in a fully optimizing model matching the Chinese economy. Even though the private investment falls in the nontradable sector, real expenditure and money balance decrease in the short run, the infrastructure investment greately enhances the efficiency and produc...

While private equity (PE) is expanding rapidly in developing countries, there is little academic research on this subject. In this paper I exploit two new data sources and employ two distinct empirical strategies to identify the impact of PE on Indian firms. I compare the investments made by one of India’s largest PE firms to the investments that just missed (deals that made it to the final rou...

We investigate how the description of a correlated information V improves the investment in the stock market X . The objective is to maximize the growth rate of wealth in repeated investments. We find a single-letter characterization of the incremental growth rate (R), the maximum increase in growth rate when V is described to the investor at rate R. The incremental growth rate specialized to t...

There is little evidence that the expansion of microfinance has reduced poverty, but is instead increasingly associated with problematic multiple borrowing at high interest rates and high levels of debt and default. We develop a model that rationalizes these outcomes-if entrepreneurs cannot commit to exclusive borrowing from a single lender, expanding financial access by introducing multiple le...

We use a new firm-level dataset to examine the efficiency of investment in emerging economies. In the three-year period following stock market liberalizations, the growth rate of the typical firm’s capital stock exceeds its pre-liberalization mean by an average of 5.4 percentage points. Cross-sectional changes in investment are significantly correlated with the signals about fundamentals embedd...

A number of studies have found that foreign direct investment (FDI) can have positive impacts on productivity. However, while FDI has clearly positive impacts on technology transfers, its effects on resource use within firms is less clear and, in principle, efficiency losses might offset some of the productivity gains associated with improved technologies. In this paper, we study the impacts of...