Integrated capital markets facilitate risk sharing across countries. Lower home bias in financial investments is an indicator of risk sharing. We highlight that existing indicators of equity home bias in the literature suffer from incomplete coverage because they consider only listed equities....

Digital payments have increasingly been adopted by consumers and firms in Latin America and the Caribbean. This policy research paper analyzes recent post-pandemic data on digital payments in the region to describe adoption patterns, measure adoption gaps, and identify adoption barriers. The...

We use the introduction of a U.S. commercial credit bureau to study when lenders adopt voluntary information sharing technology and the resulting consequences for competition and credit access. Our results suggest that lenders trade off access to new markets against heightened competition for...

Cyclical systemic risk arises when macro-financial imbalances accumulate over time. Past financial crises which occurred in several countries around the world have shown that heightened cyclical risk can lead to exorbitant economic and financial costs if the appropriate macroprudential policies...

I study the effect of access to payday loans on the timing, level and composition of consumption. Using a newly obtained military administrative dataset of sales at on-base grocery and department stores, I examine how consumption behavior changes after the passage of a federal law that...

Transaction costs impose a barrier to savings, but lowering them may have smaller impacts than expected due to other constraints, such as psychological biases. Within the context of retirement savings under defined contributions in the privatized pension system in Mexico, we analyze two...

Concurrent with the rapid development of the market for catastrophe (cat) bonds, a steady decline in their risk premia has been observed. Whether the latter trend is consistent with the evolution of natural disasters risk is an open question. Indeed, a large share of outstanding risk capital in...

It is well known that Micro and Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of the economy. Most of these companies use external financing sources like debt and equity capital to finance their activities. However, in general, in the area of SMEs' access to finance, there are...

Financial inclusion or access to financial services is a major development goal for all nations across the globe. The concept has a multitude of dimensions from payments and savings accounts, credit, insurance and pensions and securities market. Ensuring quality access to formal financial...

The Indian debt overhang issue is one of the major reasons that fresh investments are currently not being made in the scale required to promote higher growth and boost employment. Among banks the public sector banks (PSBs) are burdened with the bulk of net non-performing loans (NNPAs). These...