Implicit government guarantees to bail out troubled banks can produce a sizable fiscal contingent liability. Drawing on a rich history of various forms of staggered bailouts, this paper studies the link between bank bailouts and fiscal contingent liabilities using bank-level data for...

Since the early 1990s, public-private partnerships (PPPs) in infrastructure provision have been expanding around the world and in South Asia. Well-structured PPPs can unleash efficiency gains in the provision of infrastructure. But PPPs create liabilities for governments, including contingent...

Since the early 1990s, public-private partnerships (PPPs) in infrastructure provision have been expanding around the world and in South Asia. Well-structured PPPs can unleash efficiency gains in the provision of infrastructure. But PPPs create liabilities for governments, including contingent...

There is interest in impact investing, the idea of deploying capital to obtain both financial and social returns. But private financial returns are only possible if capital markets are not perfectly integrated, so profit opportunities still exist in certain markets. This proposition is put to...

This paper studies the effect of bank ownership on product innovation by borrowing firms, highlighting the role of the state, foreign, and combined foreign-state bank ownership. It uses Enterprise Survey data for more than 22,000 firms in 49 countries from 2016 to 2020, linked to Fitchconnect...

This paper studies the effect of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on the performance of firms in Central Asia. It uses unique data from the Business Pulse Survey run by the World Bank in the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, which tracks the sales and employment-along with other main...

This paper attempts to estimate possible losses in macroeconomic stabilization due to a move from inflation to exchange rate targeting on an example of the Czech Republic. The authors use an estimated New Keynesian policy model, general inflation and exchange rate targeting rules, and...

This article re-emphasizes the link from structural policies to enhanced macroeconomic stabilization using a small structural model estimated on quarterly data for Macedonia and Slovakia over 1995-2007. The success of macroeconomic stabilization, typically in the hands of monetary policy, is not...

Starting from the constraints and incentives that cause countries to issue debt in foreign currency, this paper provides an overview of policy approaches for choosing the optimal currency structure of sovereign foreign-currency debt. The objective of sovereign debt managers generally includes...