International financial institutions (IFIs) generally enjoy preferred creditors treatment (PCT). Although PCT rarely appears in legal contracts, when sovereigns restructure bilateral or commercial debts...
On June 1, 2017, President Trump announced the United States' withdrawal from the Paris agreement on climate change. Despite this decision, American firms continued investing in low-carbon technologies...
The World Bank Group recently adopted the "cascade framework" to "maximize finance for development." The cascade recommends that reforms be tried first, followed by subsidies, and then public investments...
This paper computes a new financial globalization index for a large sample of countries for 1992-2016. Unlike other measures, the financial globalization index corrects for the heteroscedasticity of global...
This paper presents a model of bank risk taking and government guarantees. Levered banks take excessive risk, as their actions are not fully priced at the margin by debt holders. The impact of government...
This paper investigates how the devolution of oil windfalls affects the likelihood of political violence. It shows that transferring large shares of oil wealth can prevent conflict, while transferring...
This paper looks at the correlation between the cyclical components of gross domestic product and the exchange rate and classifies countries’ currencies as pro-cyclical if they appreciate in good times...
Monitoring technologies and pay for performance contracts are becoming popular solutions to improve public services delivery. Their track record is however mixed. To show why this may be the case, this...
This paper looks at the correlation between the cyclical components of gross domestic product and the exchange rate and classifies countries' currencies as procyclical if they appreciate in good times...
The control of bribery is a policy objective in many developing countries. It has been argued that asymmetric punishments could reduce bribery by incentivizing whistle-blowing. This paper investigates...
Using a new, large data set on quarterly reserve requirements for the period 1970-2011, this paper provides new evidence on the use of reserve requirements as a countercyclical macroprudential tool in...
The active use of prudential instruments to regulate the level of credit and influence its allocation, popular in the 1970s and 1980s, fell somehow into disgrace in the 1990s, when the regulatory pendulum...
The standard macro(prudential) models focus on externalities and treat all prudential instruments as alternative, but equivalent, forms of Pigouvian taxes. This paper explicitly models individual banks'...
Is generalized debt relief an effective development strategy, or should assistance be tailored to countries characteristics? To answer this question, the authors build a simple model in which recipient...
Is generalized debt relief an effective development strategy, or should assistance be tailored to countries' characteristics? To answer this question, the authors build a simple model in which recipient...
As a means to reduce delays in public works implementation, a number of Brazilian states have recently reformed their procurement rules allowing contractor price proposals to be assessed before the technical...
This Brazil quarterly knowledge report newsletter includes some of the following headings: social assistance and shocks: the food crisis and CCT's by Fruttero, Anna; a critical juncture by Diop, Makhtar;...
Why should countries buy expensive catastrophe insurance? Abstracting from risk aversion or hedging motives, this paper shows that catastrophe insurance may have a catalytic role on external finance. Such...