The book aims at perfecting the national governance system and improving national governance ability. It evaluates the balance sheets of the state and residents, non-financial corporations, financial institutions and the central bank, the central government, local government and external sectors...

What difference does it make, and for whom, whether the nonperforming debts of emerging market borrowers are restructured? This paper begins by positing a set of counterfactual conditions under which restructuring would not matter, and then shows how several ways in which the actual world of...

We study impacts of a cash transfer program with no means-test and no work restrictions: the US Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) Disability Compensation program. Our empirical strategy leverages quasi-random assignment of veterans claiming mental disorder disability to examiners who vary in...

We investigate the transmission of central bank liquidity to bank deposits and loan spreads in Europe over the period from January 2006 to June 2010. We find evidence consistent with an impaired transmission channel due to bank risk. Central bank liquidity does not translate into lower loan...

This book proposes a method for calculating China’s debt based on a quantitative econometric analysis. This is conducted by measuring the relationship between China’s debt size and economic growth. The conclusion that is reached is as follows: China’s current debt has already exceeded the...

We analyze government interventions to alleviate debt overhang among banks. Interventions generate two types of rents. Informational rents arise from opportunistic participation based on private information while macroeconomic rents arise from free riding. Minimizing informational rents is a...

Some commentators have argued that the housing crisis may harm labor markets because homeowners who owe more than their homes are worth are less likely to move to places that have productive job opportunities. I show that, in the available data, negative equity does not make homeowners less...

Fire sales are forced sales of assets in which high-valuation bidders are sidelined, typically due to debt overhang problems afflicting many specialist bidders simultaneously. We overview theoretical and empirical research on asset fire sales, which shows how they can arise, how they can lead to...

Do external imbalances increase the risk of financial crises? In this paper, we study the experience of 14 developed countries over 140 years (1870-2008). We exploit our long-run dataset in a number of different ways. First, we apply new statistical tools to describe the temporal and spatial...

Using a unique dataset matched at the individual level from two administrative sources, we examine household choices between liabilities and assess the informational content of prime and subprime credit scores in the consumer credit market. First, more specifically, we assess consumers'...