Using the World Bank Enterprise Surveys, we investigate the prevalence and correlates of collateralized borrowing in 131 countries between 2005-2017. Overall, 77 percent of loans require collateral, and the median loan-to-collateral value is 60 percent. Small firms and loans from non-bank...

Using survey data from the Indonesian manufacturing industry, this paper investigates the impact of minimum wage on employment and wages offered by Indonesian manufacturing firms from 1993 to 2006. It shows that the estimated effects of minimum wage on employment are positive within a province...

This paper surveys the academic and policy debate on the roots of global imbalances, their role in the inception of the global crisis, and their prospects in its aftermath. The conventional view holds that global imbalances result primarily from unsustainably high demand for goods in the United...

This paper examines the extent of consumption risk sharing for a group of 50 high-income and developing countries. The analysis is based on the empirical implementation of a model of partial consumption insurance whose parameters have the natural interpretation of coefficients of partial risk...

This paper investigates the causal impact of oil price fluctuations on financial markets since January 2014. Following a heteroscedasticity-based event study approach, the paper instruments changes in oil prices by exogenous shocks in oil supply. It finds that oil price declines raise...

This paper estimates dynamic employment multipliers in a U.S. county during 1998-2015. On average, one exogenous tradable job gain creates 1.1 jobs in the rest of the county economy in the same year, but is offset by losses of 0.23 job one year later and 0.32 job two years later. The multiplier...

This paper studies the effects of a reform in Serbia that transferred business registration from regional courts to a centralized agency. Using administrative data, the analysis employs a difference-in-difference strategy that compares new firms before and after the reform across districts based...

This paper documents the existence of a "middle-income trap" for the Middle East and North Africa region. It argues that the economic woes of the Middle East and North Africa offer new insights into the debate on the trap which has thus far focused on the East Asia and Pacific region. The...

This paper examines the labor market impacts of a large-scale marine environmental crisis caused by toxic chemical contamination in Vietnam's central coast in 2016. Combining labor force surveys with satellite data on fishing-boat detection, the analysis finds negative and heterogeneous impacts...

The pattern of debt flows to peripheral European Monetary Union members seems puzzling: they are mostly indirect and channeled through the large countries of the European Monetary Union. This paper examines to what extent the introduction of the euro and the elimination of the intra-area...