Under the Kyoto Protocol, industrialized countries (called Annex I countries) have to reduce their combined emissions to 5 percent below 1990 levels in the first commitment period of 2008-12. Efforts to reduce emissions to meet Kyoto targets and beyond have raised issues of competitiveness in...

The past decades witnessed big changes in international trade with the rise of global value chains. Some countries, such as China, Poland, and Vietnam, rode the tide, while other countries, many in the Africa region, faltered. This paper studies the determinants of participation in global value...

Using a comprehensive and proprietary data set on international private equity activity, this paper studies the determinants of buyout investments across 61 countries and 19 industries over 1990-2017. The study finds evidence that macroeconomic conditions, development of stock and credit...

Recent evidence suggests only modest social and economic impacts of microfinance. Favorable cost-benefit ratios then depend on low costs. This paper uses proprietary data on 1,335 microfinance institutions between 2005 and 2009, jointly serving 80.1 million borrowers, to calculate the costs of...

This paper examines how the ability to access long-term debt affects firm-level growth volatility. The analysis finds that firms in industries with stronger preference to use long-term finance relative to short-term finance experience lower growth volatility in countries with better-developed...

Using a data set covering about 277,000 firms across 79 countries over the period 2004-11, this paper examines the evolution of firms' capital structure during the global financial crisis and its aftermath in 2010-11. The study finds that firm leverage and debt maturity declined in advanced...

This paper finds that shareholder-friendly corporate governance is positively associated with bank insolvency risk, as proxied by the Z-score and the Merton's distance to default measure, for an international sample of banks over the 2004-08 period. Banks are special in that "good" corporate...