We examine what is perceived as one of the main culprits in the occurrence of banking crises: financial liberalization. As is typically argued, if liberalization is accompanied by insufficient prudential supervision of the banking sector, it will result in excessive risk taking by financial intermediaries and a subsequent crisis. Having evaluated the empirical validity of this hypothesis, we co...

The study estimates the growth rates of frozen food, shrimp and total export, and instability of export earnings. The study evaluates the export marketing of frozen food; shrimp and fish by using time series aggregated data from the year of 1972-73 to 2005-06. The growth rates of frozen food were 44%, 11%, and 10% during post-war period (197273 to 1982-83), pre-trade liberalization (1983-84 to ...

I use a large cross country data set and panel probit analysis to investigate the way in which the interaction between trade and financial openness affect the probability of external crises. This analysis is related to debate on the adequate sequencing of reform. I also investigate the role played by current account and fiscal imbalances, contagion, international reserves holdings, and the exch...

The financial liberalization in the four Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden) that took place mostly in the 1980s led to a major financial crisis in three of those countries. The crises in Finland, Norway, and Sweden are among the deepest financial crises in advanced market economies since World War II. Denmark experienced some banking problems but managed to avoid a systemic...

Mr. Crockett: May I make an analogy and see whether it conveys any insights? In the finance field, we think of technology and liberalization as having driven the enormous changes in financial markets. Technology enables the better pricing of risk; liberalization allows risk to be more efficiently managed and traded. Could one say that something similar is taking place in labor markets? Technolo...

Using a new dataset of 369 manufacturing firms in developing countries, we present the first firm-level analysis of capital account liberalization and investment. In the three-year period following liberalizations, the growth rate of the typical firm’s capital stock exceeds its preliberalization mean by an average of 4.1 to 5.4 percentage points per year. We use a simple model of Tobin’s q to d...

Two-sector models with traded and non-traded goods have problems accounting for the stylized fact that the real exchange rate appreciates and consumption booms for several years following trade liberalization, or exchange-rate-based stabilization programs, in small open economies. The paper investigates some possible solutions to this ‘price-consumption puzzle’and evaluates their quantitative i...

This paper shows that the type of production technology, specifically whether it exhibits decreasing returns to scale in capital, is an important factor in evaluating the welfare gain from liberalizing financial markets, and hence the optimal financial structure for a country. As financial markets become completely liberalized, countries gain from a better capital allocation as a result of impr...