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In this paper, I explain variations in international investors’ reactions to International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs. Investors react favorably if a borrowing government is credibly committed to implementing essential IMF conditionality. Instead of engaging complex information processing about economic reform, however, investors rely on a heuristic device to assess the borrower’s domestic political conditions. I argue that a borrowing government’s popularity is an important cue for investors to assess the prospect of an IMF program. Investors associate higher government popularity with better implementation of the program and react more favorably to more popular borrowers. Using annual data from up to 52 emerging market economies from 1998 to 2017, I find robust statistical evidence supporting these claims: an IMF program alone does not restore investor confidence. Rather, an IMF program carried out by a strong government does. My findings have important implications for the study of global financial governance and credible commitment.

The VoIP technology is being revisited to support diversified services and mobile computing has been changing to mobile cloud computing paradigm. In this paper, we design and implement cloud-leveraged secured voice services, enabled by the combination of open-source software PBX (private branch exchange), shared hardware platform, and mobile devices. We also test and verify the end-to-end delay of the secured voice communication. In addition, we propose a preliminary idea to improve the portability by adopting Docker-based containers.

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