This paper develops a model of political regulation in which politicians set the regulated price in order to maximize electoral support by signaling to voters a pro-consumer behavior. Political incentives and welfare constraints interact in the model, yielding an equilibrium in which the real...

Drawing on the 2016 update of the IMF's Central Bank Legislation Database, this paper examines differences in central bank legal frameworks before and after the Global Financial Crisis. Examples from select countries show that many central bank laws have undergone changes in objectives,...

This paper examines the extent to which firms in selected MENA countries reported being constrained by the business environment around the time of the Arab Spring and the extent to which these constraints affected their employment performance. The results suggest that small firms in MENA faced...

Financial technology (Fintech) has prompted authorities to consider their potential financial stability benefits, risks, and effective regulation. Recent developments suggest that regulatory approaches and their legal foundations need to augment entity-based regulation with increasing focus on...

We estimate the evolution of markups of publicly traded firms in 74 economies from 1980-2016. In advanced economies, markups have increased by an average of 39 percent since 1980. The increase is broad-based across industries and countries, and driven by the highest markup firms in each economic...

The rapid uptake of mobile money in recent years has generated new data needs and growing interest in understanding its impact on broad money. This paper reviews mobile money trends using mobile money data from the Financial Access Survey (FAS) and examines the statistical treatment of mobile...