The selective income tax exemption for home-state municipal bonds at issue in Davis v. Kentucky Department of Revenue is a barrier to interstate commerce.

This staff report on People’s Republic of China 2013 Article IV Consultation highlights macroeconomic developments and outlook. China has maintained robust growth since the global crisis, but the heavy reliance on credit and investment to sustain activity is raising vulnerabilities. The...

Staff Discussion Notes showcase the latest policy-related analysis and research being developed by individual IMF staff and are published to elicit comment and to further debate. These papers are generally brief and written in nontechnical language, and so are aimed at a broad audience...

Emerging European countries have made large strides in developing their local capital markets since the early-1990s. However, the rate of development has been widely disparate across countries and market segments, underpinned by the varying degrees of progress made in key areas such as...

This paper studies the spillover effects both within the bond markets for individual U.S. states and between the latter and the market for U.S. Treasury securities. We perform the Forbes and Rigobon (2002) spillover test using daily bond yield data over the period 2005 to 2011. Results are...

This study empirically analyzes the determinants of bond market development in a cross section of 23 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries between 1990 and 2008. It considers the stage of development and the size of the bond market, as well as the historical, structural, institutional and...

Under what circumstances can market forces prevent unsustainable borrowing? Effective market discipline requires that capital markets be open, that; information on the borrower’s existing liabilities be readily available, that no bailout be anticipated, and that the borrower respond to market...

This paper tests empirically the theoretical prediction that the country premium paid by emerging economies on sovereign debt increases with the amount of debt up to a certain critical level, above which the supply of foreign funds becomes fixed. The results confirm this theoretical prediction....

The paper proposes a framework for examining the process of financial market development. The framework, consistent with the functional view of financial system design, is anchored in studying the incentives facing the key players in financial markets-borrowers, lenders, liquidity providers, and...

Economic theory suggests that vulnerable financial conditions of the corporate sector can trigger or worsen an economy-wide recession. This paper proposes a measure of corporate vulnerability, the Corporate Vulnerability Index (CVI) and analyses whether it can explain the probability and...