BANKS, FINANCIAL LIBERALIZATION AND THE ‘INTEREST RATE PREMIUM PUZZLE’ IN EAST ASIA

The majority of OECD countries has experienced a reduction in macroeconomic volatility during the last two decades. This period is also characterized by a gradual liberalization of the capital accounts of from these countries. The goal of this paper is to study whether capital markets liberalization can lead to lower macroeconomic volatility. We study a business cycle model with multiple countr...

This paper examines the optimal financial markets liberalization policy for a large country in a two-country general equilibrium production economy. In our model, household’s portfolio choice is modeled separately from firm’s investment decision and financial markets play an important role in the allocation of capital between production technologies. We find that the type of production technolo...

Article history: Received 29 August 2012 Received in revised form 21 May 2013 Accepted 6 August 2013 Available online 15 August 2013 We test the impact of idiosyncratic risk on stock returns for emerging markets that experience financial market liberalizations. Idiosyncratic risk is positively associated with returns prior to financial market liberalization, but liberalization diminishes this e...

This paper examines the relationship of financial liberalization and stock markets integration among ASEAN-5 (Note 1) stock markets: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. Three sample periods are covered based on the progress of financial liberalization. By using Johansen and Juselius multivariate cointegration procedures, Granger-causality tests and variances decomposit...

Evidence supporting the positive effects of capital account liberalization on growth is mixed at best. Even after conditioning on the quality of domestic financial institutions, a significant number of studies still find no effect. One possible explanation is reverse causation. If low growth countries liberalize in order to spur growth, the observed correlation between growth and liberalization...

Although theory emphasizes the role of financial market frictions in explaining income inequality, there is little empirical research exploring how financial development and financial sector reforms influence the evolution of income inequality. This paper examines how finance impacts on income inequality in India using annual time series data for over half a century. The results indicate that w...

JULY/AUGUST 2003 75 Bekaert, Harvey, and Lundblad (BHL) are to be congratulated for producing another paper on equity market liberalizations in emerging markets, and it is a pleasure to discuss their work. Yet, there are three reasons why I may not be an impartial discussant: (i) Having devoted most of my fledgling career to the study of capital account liberalization in emerging markets, I am ...

Financial liberalization should reduce borrowing constraints and increase capital demand according to theory. If production functions exhibit capital-skill complementarity, liberalization should increase the aggregate demand for skilled labor relative to unskilled labor, increasing wage inequality in equilibrium. This paper studies the effects of financial liberalization on inequality through t...