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Cover; Half-title; Title; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; Figures and Tables; Preface; Globalization, Politics, and Financial Turmoil: Asia's Banking Crisis; 1 Introduction; 2 Bank Regulation; 3 The Signaling Argument; 4 Incredible Signaling in Democracies: The Cases of Thailand, South Korea, and the Philippines; 5 Unorthodox Solutions to the Signaling Problem: The Cases of Malaysia and Indonesia; 6 Orthodox Solutions to the Signaling Problem: The Cases of Singapore and Hong Kong; 7 Some Concluding Remarks; Appendix I The World Bank's Evaluation of Bank Regulatory Environments.

Can financial connections to the military provide economic value in democratic environments? We address this question by studying whether firms in which the Turkish military had a controlling financial interest earned abnormally high stock returns on the Istanbul stock exchange. Our findings from event studies are that this is indeed the case. We infer that militaries can retain substantial power to influence economic policy from behind the scenes even after formally transferring it to democratically elected leaders. The paper contributes to the literature in public choice by demonstrating econometrically that the military can be a major rent seeking actor even in democratic environments. Adapted from the source document.

Statistical studies on the effects of capital controls on growth have generally yielded insignificant results. In this paper, we show that capital controls negatively affect growth in authoritarian countries, while growth in democratic countries is insignificantly affected. We also show that the adverse effects of capital controls likely pass through the efficiency of investment. Our findings suggest that policy makers should take careful account of the political context when considering the decision to impose capital controls. Adapted from the source document.

"Do superpower interventions to install and prop up political leaders in other countries subsequently result in more or less democracy, and does this effect vary depending on whether the intervening superpower is democratic or authoritarian? While democracy may be expected to decline contemporaneously with superpower interference, the effect on democracy after a few years is far from obvious. The absence of reliable information on covert interventions has hitherto served as an obstacle to seriously addressing these questions. The recent declassification of Cold War CIA and KGB documents now makes it possible to systematically address these questions in the Cold War context. We thus develop a new panel dataset of superpower interventions during the Cold War. We find that superpower interventions are followed by significant declines in democracy, and that the substantive effects are large. Perhaps surprisingly, once endogeneity is addressed, US and Soviet interventions have equally detrimental effects on the subsequent level of democracy; both decrease democracy by about 33%. Our findings thus suggest that one should not expect significant differences in the adverse institutional consequences of superpower interventions based on whether the intervening superpower is a democracy or a dictatorship"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

An interesting stream of the civil conflict literature has identified an important subset of civil conflicts with disastrous consequences, that is, those that emerge as a consequence of shocks to renewable natural resources like land and water. This literature is, however, reliant on qualitative case studies when claiming a causal relationship leading from renewable resource shocks to conflict. In this article, we seek to advance the literature by drawing out the implications of a well-known formal model of the renewable resources–conflict relationship and then conducting rigorous statistical tests of its implications in the case of a serious ongoing civil conflict in India. We find that a one standard deviation decrease in our measure of renewable resources increases killings by nearly 60 percent over the long run.

The literature on the determinants of democratization has long been dominated by a view that claimed a central role for economic development ('modernization'). Acemoglu et al. (2008, 2009) have recently challenged the robustness of empirical support for the modernization hypothesis. As an alternative, they claim that democratization is likely to occur in moments of economic crisis. Bruckner and Ciccone (2011) appear to offer strong support for this latter view, and claim that lagged adverse GDP shocks generated by poor rainfall generate 'windows of opportunity' for democratization in contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa. The current article presents evidence that Bruckner and Ciccone's provocative finding does not survive several sensible robustness checks, calling into question whether their claim in fact offers new insights into the process of democratization. Adapted from the source document.

The literature on the determinants of democratization has long been dominated by a view that claimed a central role for economic development ('modernization'). Acemogluet al. (2008, 2009) have recently challenged the robustness of empirical support for the modernization hypothesis. As an alternative, they claim that democratization is likely to occur in moments of economic crisis. Brückner and Ciccone (2011) appear to offer strong support for this latter view, and claim that lagged adverse GDP shocks generated by poor rainfall generate 'windows of opportunity' for democratization in contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa. The current article presents evidence that Brückner and Ciccone's provocative finding does not survive several sensible robustness checks, calling into question whether their claim in fact offers new insights into the process of democratization.