This paper studies firms’ information withholding in a mandatory environmental disclosure regime where regulators only allow firms to withhold information regarded as a trade secret. I find evidence of withholding information for reasons other than proprietary-cost concerns, which is...

What does global trade mean for the environment of any particular place? It can produce place-based transformations that are both positive and negative. The Kuznets curve is often touted as a solution that resolves the conflict between trade promotion and environmental protection by purporting...

I build a model where creditworthy countries may use fiscal austerity to communicate their ability to repay sovereign debt and show that the signaling channel is active only for high levels of asymmetric information. The model generates a negative association between the amount of public...

From early 2017, Rosstat began to apply OKVED 2 – the new All-Russian Classifier of Economic Activities, thus necessitating extreme caution in interpreting the industrial production statistics. The results of calculations performed by the Gaidar Institute point to the persistent presence of...

We examine the factors that influence borrower's choice between structured finance (SF) and straight debt finance (SDF). Using a sample of 12,075 Western European loans and bonds issued between 2000 and 2011, we find that borrowers choose SF when they seek long-term financing and funding cost...

I build a model where creditworthy countries may use fiscal austerity to communicate their ability to repay sovereign debt and show that the signaling channel is active only for high levels of asymmetric information. The model generates a negative association between the amount of public...

This Article argues that the norms and legal practices of global finance in the arenas of sovereign debt and private wealth have led to a significant market failure, in particular the over-supply of sovereign borrowing and a related misallocation of global capital away from its most productive...

We study the factors that, arguably, affect the probability of a new borrower choosing between structured finance (SF), either project finance (PF) loans or asset securitization (AS) bonds, and straight debt finance (SDF) – corporate bonds (CB) – transactions using a large cross section of...

Sovereign ratings have frequently failed to predict crises. However, the literature has focused on explaining rating levels rather than the timing of rating announcements. We fill this gap by explicitly differentiating between a decision to assess a country and the actual rating decision....

Although there is a wide consensus that rating agencies have frequently failed to predict major crises, the literature on sovereign ratings has so far mostly focused on explaining the rating level rather than explaining the timing of the rating decision. In this paper we aim to fill this gap in...