Finance: Research, Policy and Anecdotes

The University of Cape Town, Economic Research Southern Africa, Imperial College and the Review of Finance organized a conference on Financial Intermediation in Emerging Markets in Cape Town, following a similar conference last September in Rio.   While the papers were selected competitively by an excellent program committee, all BRICS countries were covered.  Felix Noth and Matias Ossandon Busch track post-Lehman funding shocks of Brazilian banks across their branch network and show a negative effect on local labor markets. Ralph de Haas and Cagatay Bircan exploit variation within Russia to show that the lack of access to finance inhibits firm innovation. Our academic keynote speaker Manju Puri summarized her research on bank runs in India.  And Nathan Dong, Ming Gu and Hua He gauge the effect on firm value of private placements of equity securities in China and find quite different effects than in more developed financial markets.    South Africa, finally, was not only covered by several papers on the Day Ahead agenda, but also by our second keynote speaker, the governor of the South African Reserve Bank Lesetja Kganyago who discussed the challenges of regulators in South Africa and the region, ranging from the post-GFC regulatory reforms, over changes in global banking (e.g., decision of Barclays to divest from ABSA, one of the large four in South Africa), to fintech (efficiency-enhancing innovation or fragility risk?).   Plus many other papers that focus not just on hot academic but also policy-relevant topics, including long-term finance and spill-over effects of monetary policy and liquidity shocks in the U.S./Europe on the rest of the world.  

After Brazil and South Africa we are planning a third conference in one of the other BRICS economies in 2017 or 18.... stay tuned! 

Overview