Upon assuming control of Baoshang Bank, Chinese bank regulators announced that they would eschew bailing out large creditors of this city-level distressed bank in full. This paper investigates the consequences of this unexpected deviation from the long-standing full bailout policy. Employing a...

We examine the effect of regional favoritism on firms’ access to credit. Using firm-level data on a large sample of 29,000 firms covering 48 countries, we investigate the hypothesis that access to credit of firms is higher in the birth regions of national political leaders. We find evidence...

We evaluate the impact of loan-to-value restrictions on household financial vulnerability. Using Norwegian tax data, we first document a beneficial leverage effect, in which households respond to the regulation by reducing house purchase probabilities, debt and interest expenses. Second, we...

This paper develops a new class of poverty and inequality measures we call common prosperity. This measure complements existing classes of measures and allows decomposition across income sources or components of consumption expenditure. This framework enables us to study the trade-off between...

Do sanctions strengthen the targeted regime? I analyze the 2014 imposition of Western sanctions on Russia and its impact on voting. The United States and the European Union introduced targeted measures against Russian entities and individuals related to President Putin’s regime. Using polling...

We estimate empirically the debt limits and debt capacity of listed manufacturing firms in Nigeria over the period 2005-2019. The analysis contributes to our understanding of the financial constraints of the firms, and their scope to absorb shocks and finance growth using the debt market. The...

Using an international panel of banks, we study whether banks’ capitalization and risk-taking are shaped by their prior economic experience. We find that, on average, bank’s past undercapitalization experience leads to more prudent lending and higher capitalization. However, we show that...

This paper sheds light on the effectiveness of policies addressing high non-performing loans (NPLs). Using data on ownership of subsidiaries of foreign banks in Emerging Europe, we first show that changes in NPLs of parent banks are associated with changes in NPLs of their foreign affiliates,...

Does income inequality affect banks' credit-risk reallocation when facing financial distress? Using novel branch-level data on Colombian banks I find that facing a large liquidity shock, exposed banks shift more credit towards low-risk borrowers in municipalities with higher income inequality....

We present unique data on governance in Russian financial institutions. Despite the recent introduction of the corporate governance code, we observe large cross-sectional differences in the composition of supervisory and executive boards of directors of Russian banks. We begin analyzing the data...