The Bruneian Government has set an ambitious target to achieve a top 10 ranking on the UNDP’s Human Development Index (HDI) by 2035. To achieve its objective (described in a national strategy document called the Wawasan 2035), Brunei’s economy needs to grow by 6%-7%. Is setting an HDI target...

How far do China’s property prices need to drop in order to send the country into a recession? What does this question tell us about the way Bubble Economies work? In this paper, we develop a theory of Bubble Economics – non-linear and often “systemic” (in the mathematical sense of the...

We use novel and unique data to study the effect of price changes in the market for luxury and middle class homes. We find that luxury home sales respond less to price changes than the middle-class home sales; in the market for luxury homes, past prices affect current prices; luxury home prices...

The banks are known as the backbones of any economy. The banks link the saving surplus units with deficit units thereby providing investment and capital formation opportunities to both the units. In the recent times of financial shrinkages and up & down, the banking sector has witnessed various...

We review the empirical evidence on the impact of microcredit on poverty in Bangladesh. Drawing on evidence from seven empirical studies with 306 estimates, we examine the impact of microcredit on three proxies of poverty – income, assets and consumption/expenditure. After addressing issues of...

The study analyses the welfare performance of banks’ lending services in the Ghanaian banking industry with emphasis on the role of market power and efficiency. We made use of pooled OLS regression with fixed effect model. For robustness, we adopted Prais–Winsten (1954) regression and...

This study examines the implications of CEO power on the board structure of banks in the Ghanaian banking industry. Using a unique hand-collected dataset in respect of 21 commercial banks in Ghana for the 2009 – 2017 periods, the results show that CEO power underscores the absence or lack of...

The study employs macrodata on 42 African countries to examine whether remittances and financial development (including the sub-components of access, depth and efficiency) contribute to the equalisation of incomes across the continent. Robust evidence from the dynamic GMM estimator shows that:...

We identify the relative importance for lending of borrower (demand) versus bank (supply) factors. We submit thousands of fictitious mortgage applications, changing one borrower-level factor at time, to the major Italian online mortgage platform. Each application goes to all banks. We find that...

This paper identifies a precautionary banking liquidity shock via a set of sign, zero and forecast variance restrictions imposed. The shock proxies the banking sector's reluctance to lend to the real economy induced by an exogenous preference change for liquid assets. Through the lens of a DSGE...