Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) share the biggest part in Myanmar economy in terms of number, contribution to employment, output, and investment. Myanmar economic growth is thus totally dependent on the development of SMEs in the private sector. Today, the role of SMEs has become more vital...

We provide an overview of data requirements necessary to monitor repurchase agreements (repos) and securities lending (sec lending) markets for the purposes of informing policymakers and researchers about firm-level and systemic risk. We start by explaining the functioning of these markets, and...

This paper provides support for the proposition that securities class actions help solve agency problems. Two key findings support this conclusion. First, firms that are more likely to suffer from agency problems are more likely to face class actions. Risky firms, large firms, young firms, low...

Measures of the value of public investments are critical inputs into the policy process, and aggregate production and cost functions have become the dominant methods of evaluating these benefits. This paper examines the limitations of these approaches in light of applied production and spatial...

Payday loans are widely condemned as a “predatory debt trap.” We test that claim by researching how households in Georgia and North Carolina have fared since those states banned payday loans in May 2004 and December 2005. Compared with households in all other states, households in Georgia...

This paper analyzes some recent theoretical and practical evidence in terms of economic results of different exchange rate systems. It begins with a historical review and a summary of fixed versus flexible exchange rate systems. Then it compares the experiences of recent currency unions, mostly...

The improvement of financial intermediation functions is crucial for a robust banking system. When lending, banks have to cope with such problems as information asymmetry and adverse selection. In order to mitigate these problems, banks have to product information and improve their techniques of...

Foreign currency deposits (FCD) are prevalent in many low-income developing countries, but their impact on bank lending has rarely been examined. An examination of cross-country data indicates that a higher proportion of FCD in total deposits is associated with growth in private credit only in...