Housing cycles and their impact on the financial system and the macroeconomy have become the center of attention following the global financial crisis. This paper documents the characteristics of housing cycles in a large set of countries, and examines the determinants of house price movements....

We examine how the cost of corporate credit varies around fiscal consolidations aimed at reducing government debt. Using a new dataset on fiscal consolidations and syndicated corporate loan data, we find that loan spreads increase with fiscal consolidations, especially for small firms, domestic...

As climate change looms larger, many look to sustainable investing that incorporates environmental, social, and governance (ESG) concerns as part of the way forward. To assess scope for ESG-conscious investing to achieve climate change goals, we explore the link between emissions growth and ESG...

Whether and to what extent tougher bank regulation weighs on economic growth is an open empirical question. Using data from 28 manufacturing industries in 50 countries, we explore the extent to which cross-country differences in bank liquidity and capital levels were related to differences in...

We track direct public interventions and public holdings in 1,114 financial institutions over the period 2007-17 in 37 countries based on publicly available information. We use aggregate official data to validate this new dataset and estimate the fiscal impact of interventions, including the...

In this paper, we discuss whether and how bank lobbying can lead to regulatory capture and have real consequences through an overview of the motivations behind bank lobbying and of recent empirical evidence on the subject. Overall, the findings are consistent with regulatory capture, which...

We examine the extent to which regulations of entry and credit access are related to competition using data on 28 manufacturing sectors across 64 countries. A robust finding is that bureaucratic and costly entry regulations tend to hamper competition, as proxied by the price-cost margin, in the...

The ongoing global financial crisis is rooted in a combination of factors common to previous financial crises and some new factors. The crisis has brought to light a number of deficiencies in financial regulation and architecture, particularly in the treatment of systemically important financial...

Housing cycles and their impact on the financial system and the macroeconomy have become the center of attention following the global financial crisis. This paper documents the characteristics of housing cycles in a large set of countries, and examines the determinants of house price movements....