Developing Asia has undergone a dramatic shift over the past 5 decades from a region of mainly lowincome economies toward one that is largely middle income. Compared with world aggregate data, developing Asia now has a much greater proportion of middle-income economies. The region faces the...

Asia's rapid population aging fortifies the case for strengthening human capital investments. Further, the experience of the newly industrialized economies suggests that human capital investments will be a vital ingredient of the transition from middle income to high income. Those investments...

Gauging foreign (domestic) biases as the deviation of foreign (domestic) investors' actual portfolio allocation of a bond market from the same bond market's weight in global bond market, we investigate the determinants of foreign and domestic investment biases in 41 global bond markets. We find...

In this study, we attempt to understand the role of greater access to finance, i.e., stocks, bonds, and bank loans, in public-private partnership (PPP) investment in developing countries. Most developing countries still depend heavily on fiscal financing for infrastructure projects. Our...

A large empirical literature finds that financial development is beneficial for economic growth, although some recent evidence suggests otherwise. We contribute to the finance-growth literature by examining the role of credit growth skewness and long-run growth. Earlier literature found that...

It is widely believed that local currency bond markets (LCBMs) can promote financial stability in developing countries. For instance, they can help mitigate the currency and maturity mismatch that contributed to the outbreak of the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. In this paper, we...

The rapid accumulation of private debt is widely viewed as a major risk to financial and economic stability. This paper systematically and comprehensively assesses the effect of private debt buildup on economic growth. In the spirit of Mian, Sufi, and Verner (2017) that separately examine the...

The paper compares fiscal cyclicality across regions and countries from 1960 to 2016. It finds that more than half of 170 countries analyzed in seven regions had, in more recent years, limited fiscal space, and that their fiscal policy was either cyclical or procyclical. This was particularly...

This paper empirically investigates the relationship between the speed of buildup of private debt (household and corporate) and the depth of recessions. To do this, we differentiate between financial recessions and normal recessions on the basis of how quickly their private debt builds up. In...

Technological progress may be less beneficial for older workers than younger workers. In this paper, we empirically examine the impact of technological change on the wage share of older workers. More specifically, we look at five different types of technological advancement using data from 30...