Open data and open government data have recently attracted much attention as a means to innovate, add value, and improve outcomes in a variety of sectors, public and private. Although some of the benefits of open data initiatives have been assessed in the past, particularly their economic and...

We show that financial crises are preceded by changes in specific types of narrative information contained in newspaper article titles. Our novel international dataset and the resulting empirical evidence are gathered by integrating information from a large panel of economic news articles in...

Monetary policy leaves a fiscal footprint. In some circumstances, relieving the fiscal burden becomes the main goal of policy, and inflation control is subordinate. This article notes that the same is true of macroprudential policy, and it characterizes the size and sign of its fiscal footprint,...

This paper revisits trends in bank privatization and analyzes their economic impact over the past 25 years. Building on a novel data set of privatization events for 70 developed and developing countries, it shows that bank privatization became more frequent since the Global Financial Crisis,...

The Global Financial Safety Net (GFSN) - the institutions and arrangements that provide short-term crisis finance - has turned into a highly complex, uncoordinated system of global, multilateral, and bilateral instruments. The present paper elaborates on a composite index of the GFSN to analyse...

"The intensity of recent turbulence in financial markets has surprised nearly everyone. This paper searches out the root causes of the crisis, distinguishing them from scapegoating explanations that have been used in policy circles to divert attention from the underlying breakdown of incentives....