This paper presents evidence on implementation of the World Bank Group and Financial Sector Reform and Strengthening Initiative "Principles for Public Credit Guarantee Schemes for Small and Medium Enterprises". The evidence is based on a self-assessment of 60 schemes in 54 countries. Overall,...

This paper presents evidence on implementation of the World Bank Group and Financial Sector Reform and Strengthening Initiative "Principles for Public Credit Guarantee Schemes for Small and Medium Enterprises" . The evidence is based on a self-assessment of 60 schemes in 54 countries. Overall,...

Financial repression resurfaced in the wake of the global financial crisis and may become a common feature in the post Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) world. To advance knowledge and inform policy advice, this paper presents a new database on interest rate controls, a popular form of financial...

Recent calls on central banks and financial regulators to use the tools at their disposal to help mitigate the negative economic and social impacts of climate policies are based on several false analogies between the energy transition and the "just" energy transition. The same false analogies...

This paper revisits trends in bank privatization and analyzes their economic impact over the past 25 years. Building on a novel data set of privatization events for 70 developed and developing countries, it shows that bank privatization became more frequent since the Global Financial Crisis,...

The costs of financial intermediation have important consequences for financial development. Using bank-level data for 160 countries during 2005-14, this paper analyzes the composition and sources of bank net interest margins. First, it uses an accounting decomposition framework to provide...