Owing to the convenience of online loans, an increasing number of people are borrowing money on online platforms. With the emergence of machine learning technology, predicting loan defaults has become a popular topic. However, machine learning models have a black-box problem that cannot be...

Child maltreatment is a prevalent public health problem in both developed and developing countries. While many studies have investigated the relationship between violence against children and health of the victims, little is known about the long term economic consequences of child maltreatment,...

Current projections indicate that by 2025, water scarcity will affect over one quarter of the world’spopulation. This suggests that the need to manage water more efficiently will become more pressingduring the next few years as the demand for water increases along with the expansion...

Does greater product market competition improve external competitiveness and growth? This paper examines this question by using country-and firm-level data for a sample of 39 sub-Saharan African countries over 2000-17, as well as other emerging market economies and developing countries, and...

Countries increasingly rely on independent fiscal councils to constrain policymakers' discretion and curb the bias towards excessive deficits and pro-cyclical policies. Since fiscal councils are often recent and heterogeneous across countries, assessing their impact is challenging. Using the...