James D. Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, made points on topics that link banking to the developing world: scourge of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), which has 16 million people suffering from that disease; crime; war; migration, because migration comes from countries that do...

China has quickly become the largest e-commerce market in the world. By matching a nationally representative China Family Panel Studies survey with county-level e-commerce information obtained from Alibaba, this paper examines how e-commerce development has shaped household consumption growth in...

This Guidance Paper provides a primer on distributed ledger technology (DLT) and highlights the junctures at which this new technology meaningfully impacts secured transactions frameworks. The aim is to identify legal and regulatory hotspots, laying the groundwork for their detailed and...

This note summarizes findings from a new paper, which lays out a methodology to determine the types of mechanisms, be they the legal system, civil organizations, or shared business interest, that firms use when entering into agreements with their suppliers and customers. Specially, the note...

Coordination between secured transactions law and rules regulating financial products and institutions is of primary importance to support establishing a sound and inclusive credit ecosystem. This Primer illustrates why coordination between secured transactions law reforms and prudential...

A structural gravity model is used to estimate barriers to services trade across many sectors, countries, and time. Since the disaggregated output data needed to infer border barriers flexibly are often missing for services, this paper derives a novel methodology for projecting output data. The...

This paper measures the impact of low-cost transport by rail in Malawi on the dispersion of agricultural commodities prices across markets by exploiting the quasi-experimental design of the nearly total collapse of domestic transport by rail in January 2003 due to the destruction of a railway...

Using close to 800,000 (2,000,000) transactions by 66,000 (303,000) households in the United States (in Finland), this paper shows that individual investors with longer holding periods choose to hold less liquid stocks in their portfolios, consistent with Amihud and Mendelson's (1986) theory of...

This paper uses a randomized controlled trial to study the effects of access to agent banking. Individuals were encouraged to open an account and transact at a banking agent or a branch of a financial institution. Compared with individuals who were sent to the branch, individuals sent to an...

Eruptions of Popular Anger: The Economics of the Arab Spring and Its Aftermath sets out to answerthree puzzles-the "Arab inequality" puzzle of civil uprisings in countries with low-to-moderateand stagnant economic inequality, the "unhappy development" paradox of increasing dissatisfactionat a...