High household indebtedness could constrain future consumption growth and increase financial stability risks. This paper uses household survey data to analyze both macroeconomic and finanical stability risks from the rapidly rising household debt in China. We find that rising household...

This paper provides a model on how altruism, quot;attachmentquot; to the home country, and portfolio diversification may act as potential motives behind workers` remittances. It shows that the level of workers` remittances depends on how great are their degrees of altruism and...

Humans are usually compassionate, caring and empathetic toward others, but are we really hardwired for altruism when a disaster hits? There is evidence that people exposed to natural disasters tend to behave more philanthropically, but most studies rely on small-scale surveys and experimental...

Remittance flows in emerging market and developing economies were surprisingly resilient during the COVID-19 crisis, providing much-needed income support for remittance-receiving households. However, households were impacted differently across income distributions. Using novel high-frequency...

The COVID-19 pandemic had posed a dramatic impact on labor markets across Europe. Forceful fiscal responses have prevented an otherwise sharper contraction. Many countries introduced or expanded job-retention schemes to preserve jobs and support households. This paper uses a microsimulation...

Recent events have shown that sovereigns, just like banks, can be subject to runs, highlighting the importance of the investor base for their liabilities. This paper proposes a methodology for compiling internationally comparable estimates of investor holdings of sovereign debt. Based on this...

Country practices towards managing financial risks on a sovereign balance sheet continue to evolve. Each crisis period, and its legacy on sovereign balance sheets, reaffirms the need for strengthening financial risk management. This paper discusses some salient features embedded in in the...

Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of non-systematic income risk? We use a series of randomized field experiments in rural India to test the importance of price and non-price factors in the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product. Demand is...

This paper introduces a new dataset on the composition of the investor base for government securities in the G20 advanced economies and the euro area. During the last decades, investors from abroad have increased their presence in government bond markets. The financial crisis broke this trend....

The paper developes a VAR macrofinance model of the Czech economy. It shows that yield misalignments from the yields implied by the macrofinance model partially determine subsequent yield changes over three to nine months. These yield misalignments tend to persist for a number of months. This...