Using evidence from Russia, we explore the effect of the introduction of deposit insurance on bank risk. Drawing on within-bank variation in the ratio of firm deposits to total household and firm deposits, so as to capture the magnitude of the decrease in market discipline after the introduction...

Beliefs about whether effort pays off govern some of the most fundamental choices individuals make. This paper uses China's Cultural Revolution to understand how these beliefs can be affected, how they impact behavior, and how they are transmitted across generations. During the Cultural...

Since political uncertainty is greater in dictatorships than in democracies, we test the hypothesis that foreign investors scrutinize public information on dictators to assess this risk. In particular, we as-sume they use five suitable dictators' characteristics: age, political experience,...

We employ a Bayesian VAR model to estimate the economic effects on the Russian economy from Western financial sanctions imposed in 2014. Sanctions caused a decrease in the amount of out-standing Russian corporate external debt, but it occurred during an episode of falling oil prices. We...

This paper considers the role of grandparental childcare in China's extraordinarily high female labor-market participation rate. Indeed, the high female labor-market participation and low labor-income penalty for childbirth is all the more remarkable given the lack of public subsidies for...

We study the credit channel of Chinese monetary policy in a structural vector autoregressive framework. Using combinations of zero and sign restrictions, we identify monetary policy shocks linked to supply and demand responses in the loan market. Our results show that policy shocks coinciding...

This paper uses loan application-level data from a peer-to-peer lending platform to study the risk-taking channel of monetary policy. By employing a direct ex-ante measure of risk-taking and estimating the simultaneous equations of loan approval and loan amount, we are the first to provide...

The slowing in China's massive economy has wide implications. China plays an essential role in international production chains, so disturbances can spill over to other economies in the global production network. We evaluate the international transmission and impact of various China-specific...

Drawing upon evidence from the Chinese corporate bond market, we study how ownership structure affects the cost of debt for firms. Our results show that state, institutional and foreign ownership formats reduce the cost of debt for firms. The benefits of state ownership are accentuated when the...

This research empirically examines the impact of China's Renminbi (RMB) bilateral swap agree-ments (BSAs) on the usage of the currency in cross-border trade transactions. By using a unique dataset from SWIFT including cross-border settlement messages of 91 countries/regions between October 2010...