Successful privatization must be accompanied by the complete removal of privileges and any public policy mission. Bank behavior changes rapidly as profit maximation replaces the bureaucratic objective function. Once privileges are granted, they are difficult to remove. Therefore, privatization...

Laws governing the foreclosure process can have direct consequences on the costs of foreclosure and could therefore affect lending decisions. We exploit the heterogeneity in the judicial requirements across U.S. states to examine their impact on banks’ lending decisions in a sample of urban...

This paper examines the drivers of liquidity shortages in the Mexican government bond market. We use unique transaction- and quote level data with information on end-investors to construct an index of bond market liquidity. We find that liquidity remained stable in recent years, although...

Quantitative easing could improve market liquidity through many channels such as relaxing bank funding constraints, increasing risk appetite, and facilitating trades. However, it can also reduce market liquidity when the increase in the central bank's holdings of certain securities leads to a...

The paper makes an assessment of the progress made in developing local debt markets in emerging Asia. Market development has been limited by hurdles confronting borrowers and lenders, current and potential liquidity providers, and insufficient support from government policies and regulations....

This paper constructs new indicators of liquidity for equity, bond and money markets in major advanced and emerging market countries, documents their evolution and comovements, and assesses the extent to which such measures are determinants of selected spreads and proxy measures of countries''...

In this paper, we investigate whether a firm's composition of foreign liabilities matters for their resilience during economic turmoil and examine which characteristics determine a firm's foreign capital structure. Using firm-level data, we corroborate previous findings from the (international)...

Public and private sector balance sheets are an important component to any analysis of debt sustainability. A vulnerable and indebted private sector can become a sudden liability for the government; alternatively, resilient household and bank balance sheets may reveal potential sources of...