Financial markets can support the transition to a more sustainable and fairer economy by influencing firms’ funding costs. To explore this mechanism, we study the extent to which investors respond to signals about the environmental or social benefits stemming from given projects or firms. We...

Bank capital ratios have increased steadily since the financial crisis. For a sample of 94 large banks from advanced and emerging economies, retained earnings account for the bulk of their higher risk-weighted capital ratios, with reductions in risk weights playing a lesser role. On average,...

Foreign exchange turnover evolves in a predictable fashion with increasing income. As income per capita rises, currency trading cuts loose from underlying current account transactions. In parallel, an increasing share of trading in the currency takes place outside the home country. At given...

Securitisation can transform ordinarily illiquid or risky assets into more liquid or less risky ones. Despite the recent rapid growth of securitisation, the Latin American market remains in its infancy, as reflected in the size and type of assets involved in transactions. Because of its...

We propose a new approach to measuring sovereign default risk. We use sovereign credit ratings and historical default rates provided by credit rating agencies to construct a measure of ratings implied expected loss. We compare our measure of expected loss from sovereign defaults with stand-alone...

Despite their importance in macroeconomic and financial stability analysis, residential property data are not easily available on a comparable basis. The BIS currently publishes more than 300 price series for 55 countries, among which it has selected one representative series for each country....

We present a new data set on credit to the general government sector for 26 advanced and 14 emerging market economies. The main benefit of these new BIS series for "public debt" is that they provide data with similar characteristics from across the globe, facilitating cross-country comparisons....