A second-generation model of currency crises is combined with a standard model ofbanks as providers of insurance against liquidity risk. In a pegged exchange rateregime, after funds have been committed to the banks, news arrives about the qualityof the banks’ assets and about the exchange rate...

In currency crises, unlike in orderly devaluations, the financial markets dominateevents. It is shown that currency collapses (crises followed by depreciations) have hada much greater adverse impact in emerging markets (defined as relatively highincomedeveloping countries exposed to...

In this paper we develop a simple procedure which delivers tests for the pres-ence of a broken trend in a univariate time series which do not require knowledgeof the form of serial correlation in the data and are robust as to whether theshocks are generated by an I(0) or an I(1) process. Two...

The service industries in general and financial services in particular have been disproportionatelylarge investors in information technology. However, critics have suggested that the productivityeffects of this investment have been negligible, a serious outcome given the importance of the...

We show that if patent protection and trade secrecy generate asymmetricmarket structure, an innovator may prefer patent protection than trade secrecy even ifthe diffusion probability is higher under the former but it increases marketconcentration by preventing some imitators...

Once a new technology has been invented, there is a credible threat of imitationwhen patents are long and imitation cost is low. When imitation is credible, the innovator hasan incentive to postpone technology adoption for relatively high cost of imitation. Thepossibility of licensing eliminates...