Using a new daily index of social unrest, we provide systematic evidence on the negative impact of social unrest on stock market performance. An average social unrest episode in an typical country causes a 1.4 percentage point drop in cumulative abnormal returns over a two-week event window....

Finance and growth emerged as a distinct field of economics during the last three decades as economists integrated the fields of finance and economic growth and then explored the ramifications of the functioning of financial systems on economic growth, income distribution, and poverty. In this...

We analyze the causes of the apparent bias towards optimism in growth forecasts underpinning the design of IMF-supported programs, which has been documented in the literature. We find that financial variables observable to forecasters are strong predictors of growth forecast errors. The greater...

We augment a linearized dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with a tractable endogenous risk mechanism, to support the joint analysis of monetary and macroprudential policy. This state dependent conditional heteroskedasticity mechanism specifies the conditional variances of...

Despite significant strides in financial development over the past decades, financial dollarization, as reflected in elevated shares of foreign currency deposits and credit in the banking system, remains common in developing economies. We study the impact of financial dollarization,...

This paper underscores the importance of the assessment of incentives of the main agents in a financial system as a key element in the analysis of financial system vulnerability and the surveillance over the financial system. We outline a diagnostic approach for the assessment of incentives....

The paper provides a theoretical and cross-country empirical analysis of the determinants of financial deepening, and finds that higher credit-to-GDP ratios are associated with stronger creditor rights and lower inflation, and that the marginal effect of improvements in creditor rights...

This paper develops a small open economy model where entrepreneurs partially finance investment using foreign currency denominated debt subject to a risk premium above and beyond international interest rates. We use Bayesian estimation techniques to evaluate the importance of balance sheet...

We provide a theoretical foundation for the claim that prolonged periods of easy monetary conditions increase bank risk taking. The net effect of a monetary policy change on bank monitoring (an inverse measure of risk taking) depends on the balance of three forces: interest rate pass-through,...