If there are benefits to international risk sharing, consumption growth variability should decrease following the liberalization of the equity market. In addition, markets with open equity markets should display lower consumption growth variability than closed markets, everything else equal. However, the recent literature on financial liberalization suggests that volatile capital flows lead to ...

Stock market liberalizations lead private investment booms. In a sample of 11 developing countries that liberalized, 9 experience growth rates of private investment above their non-liberalization median in the first year after liberalizing. In the second and third years after liberalization this number is 10 of 11 and 8 of 11 respectively. The mean growth rate of private investment in the three...

There is little disagreement among most economists that countries benefit from trade liberalization. Yet, whether unilateral, multilateral (through the World Trade Organization) or through regional integration agreements (RIAs), trade liberalization has been one of the most controversial economic issues of our time. It is the focus of everyone from politicians to union leaders and anti-globaliz...

Capital-account liberalization was once seen as an inevitable step along the path to economic development for poor countries. Liberalizing the capital account, it was said, would permit financial resources to flow from capitalabundant countries, where expected returns were low, to capital-scarce countries, where expected returns were high. The flow of resources into the liberalizing countries w...

Contrary to the predictions of standard economic theory, capital market liberalization has been a mixed blessing for many countries. Liberalization of debt inflows exposes economies to the risk of crises stemming from sudden changes in investor sentiment. Equity market liberalizations, on the other hand, have promoted growth in almost every liberalizing country. Yet equity market liberalization...

Contrary to the predictions of standard economic theory, capital market liberalization has been a mixed blessing for many countries. Liberalization of debt inflows exposes economies to the risk of crises stemming from sudden changes in investor sentiment. Equity market liberalizations, on the other hand, have promoted growth in almost every liberalizing country. Yet equity market liberalization...

This paper introduces moral hazard into a standard general equilibrium model with heterogeneous …rms, to study the impact of trade liberalization on wage inequality between identical workers. I show that trade liberalization operates on two margins of inequality, generating betweenand within-…rm wage dispersion. While the former channel has been studied in recent papers, the latter is novel in ...

This paper investigates the implications for international markets of the existence of retailers/wholesalers with market power. Two main results are shown. First, in the presence of buyer power trade liberalization may lead to retail market concentration. Due to this concentration retail prices may be higher and welfare may be lower in free trade than in autarky, thus reversing the standard e¤e...

The goal of this study is to investigate the effect of trade liberalization on economic growth in Iranian economy using a Cobb–Douglas production function, which is expanded to take into account political instability and trade liberalization. The empirical results show that in the long run the real export and import duty have positive effect on GDP, while the Labor force and education causes to...

This paper surveys recent evidence suggesting that market-oriented institutions and policies are strongly related to economic growth, focusing on studies using the economic freedom indicator of the Fraser Institute. This index is critically discussed. Also various serious shortcomings of empirical studies using this index are identified. Nevertheless there are strong indications that liberaliza...