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...

The majority of OECD countries has experienced a reduction in the volatility of output during the past two and a half decades. This period has also been characterized by a process of capital accounts liberalization among these countries. We study an open economy business cycle model with financial market frictions and show that the international liberalization of capital markets can lead to low...

In this paper we review the factors that may lead to structural changes in stock market volatility and present an analysis that assesses whether emerging stock market volatility has changed significantly over the period 1976:01-2002:03. This period corresponds to the years of more profound development of both the financial and the productive sides in emerging countries. We use alternative metho...

The paper has three purposes. First, it explains how the impact of liberalization of service sectors on output growth differs from that of liberalization of trade in goods. Second, it suggests a policy-based rather than outcome-based measure of the openness of a country’s services regime. Such openness measures are constructed for two key service sectors, basic telecommunications and financial ...

This paper pulls together existing theory and evidence to assess whether international financial liberalization, by improving the functioning of domestic financial markets and banks, accelerates economic growth. The analysis suggests that the answer is “yes.” First, liberalizing restrictions on international portfolio flows tends to enhance stock market liquidity. In turn, enhanced stock market...

This paper explores the impact on economies of trade liberalization under alternative regional and multilateral arrangements: unilateral liberalization; liberalization as part of the ASEAN regional grouping; liberalization as part of the APEC regional grouping; or liberalization as part of a multilateral trade liberalization regime. The paper is based on a Dynamic Intertemporal General Equilibr...

Introduction The Korean crisis in 1997 illustrated again the fact that large capital inflows can be a mixed blessing. Liberalization of the capital account in Korea was associated with massive private capital inflows totaling about $120 billion from 1992 through mid 1997. The reversal of these flows in the second half of 1997 and throughout 1998 was even more dramatic and generated a devastatin...