This paper analyses of how risk is allocated in China's markets for debt issued by non-financial enterprises. Compared to other major corporate bond markets China's is unusual in that unlisted, state-owned enterprises account for a large fraction of the debt issued and that the foundations of...

This paper analyzes growth and welfare effects of income taxation in a stochastic endogenous growth model with externalities in human-capital accumulation. The government participates in individual income risks by the collection of a flat-rate income tax that affects the mean and the variance of...

This paper studies fiscal policy design in an economy in which (i) the representative household has recursive preferences, and (ii) growth is endogenously sustained through innovations whose market value depends on the tax system. By reallocating tax distortions through debt, fiscal policy...

During 2008, the sudden widening of credit spreads led to a rapid decrease in the value of many financial assets, revealing a general shortage of capital for many financial institutions, with some critical peaks that required fund injection and public bailouts.The evidence of a substantial...

This paper describes a business cycle model where financial contracting with interrelated covenants is the mechanism by which bondholders and stockholders confront the risks associated with future production-investment decisions and financing decisions of the firm and in the process resolves a...

Although perceived as risk-laden, cyclical businesses with high financial and operating leverage, relatively low beta risks have been documented for the international transportation industry. This paper analyses whether such results are robust to different estimation designs and asserts that...

This paper argues that because of the irreversibility and uncertainty associated with Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) infrastructure projects, their financial evaluation should also routinely include the determination of the value of the option to defer the construction start-up. This ensures that...

Insurance companies can be exposed to climate-related physical risk through their operations and to transition risk through their $12 trillion of financial asset holdings. We assess the climate risk exposure of property and casualty (P&C) and life insurance companies in the U.S. We construct a...

This paper examines how financial frictions and policy uncertainty jointly influence firms' investments in pollution abatement. Our data analyses suggest that financially constrained firms are less likely to invest in pollution abatement and are more likely to release toxic pollutants, with this...

Insurance companies can be exposed to climate-related physical risk through their operations and to transition risk through their $12 trillion of financial asset holdings. We assess the climate risk exposure of property and casualty (P&C) and life insurance companies in the U.S. We construct a...