Ostensibly passive index funds and ETFs are surprisingly active. A third of these funds exhibit more activeness than the median actively managed fund, as measured by conventional proxies. Using hand-collected prospectus data, we find that "passive" funds offer an increasingly wide assortment of...

This study assesses the knowledge economy (KE) performance of lagging African countries visà- vis their frontier counterparts with regard to the four dimensions of the World Bank’s knowledge economy index (KEI). The empirical exercise is for the period 1996-2010. It consists of first...

This article compares African countries to South Korea in terms of knowledge economy (KE). Emphasis is laid on human capital, knowledge creation, knowledge diffusion, institutions and economic incentives. The analytical approach consists of providing knowledge economy catch-up strategies that...

This paper reviews the role of benchmark-driven investments in EM local bond markets. We provide an overview of how key EM bond benchmark indices are constructed, how they affect the behavior of investment funds, and what are the likely implications for capital flows and policy-making. Several...

Promoting credit services to small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) has been a perennial challenge for policy makers globally due to high information costs. Recent fintech developments may be able to mitigate this problem. By leveraging big data or digital footprints on existing platforms,...

We study the design features of disclosure regulations that seek to trigger the green transition of the global economy and ask whether such regulatory interventions are likely to bring about sufficient market discipline to achieve socially optimal climate targets. We categorize the transparency...