This research report is the result of a partnership between the World Bank Group (WBG) and Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) of Japan, initiated by the World Bank Group's President, Jim Yong Kim, and GPIF's Chief Investment Officer, Hiro Mizuno. The aim is for the World Bank and IFC –...

This case is considered to be the connecting thread to the 35 hour Corporate Finance course for postgraduates and executive education in which: 1) the main concepts of financial statements analysis will be reviewed, including those regarding cost structure, break-even point and operating...

We provide causal evidence that adverse capital shocks to banks affect their borrowers' performance negatively. We use an exogenous shock to the U.S. banking system during the Russian crisis of Fall 1998 to separate the effect of borrowers' demand of credit from the supply of credit by the...

Segmented capital markets may allow firms to reduce their cost of capital by increasing their reliance on the relatively cheaper market. However, this potential benefit is attenuated by the firm's costs of accessing the markets. This paper models a firm with access to two segmented capital...

Risk transfers represent a preferred method for removing pension liabilities from corporate balance sheet. We examine the role of institutional shareholders on firm’s decision to offload pension liabilities to professional risk managers. We find that the likelihood of pension risk transfers is...

Central clearing counterparties (CCPs) have a variety of economic rationales. The Great Recession of 2007-2009 led regulators to mandate CCPs for most interest-rate and credit derivatives, markets in which large amounts of risks are transferred across agents. This change led to a large increase...

The initial coin offering (ICO) market relies on the “wisdom of crowds”, ratings given by the collective opinion of crypto experts, to overcome asymmetric information problems in the fundraising process. We investigate the biases of crypto experts in providing ratings in ICOs. We conjecture...

This paper examines whether high levels of financial inclusion is associated with greater financial risk. The findings reveal that higher account ownership is associated with greater financial risk through high nonperforming loan and high cost inefficiency in the financial sector of developed...

Social networks are thought to be important for the investment and performance of mutual fund managers. We propose a measure of whether a manager is part of a network using only data on the distribution of the number of stocks headquartered in a given city that are held by managers. For some...