Economic inequality across Asia has been growing, but dimensions of this inequality and their development are unclear. This paper evaluates income inequality using household surveys from China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and Taiwan. These countries may be viewed as jointly representative of...

This paper reviews the results of a number of empirical studies of convergence among the OECD countries and discusses some limitations of these studies. Moreover, the paper tries to deal with these limitations by presenting a new and more appropriate methodology: quantile regressions. The...

Total debt in the People’s Republic of China has increased significantly in recent years, mostly on account of nonfinancial corporate debt. Earning and the financial performance of corporate firms have weakened, and so has the asset quality of the financial sector. This paper assesses the...

In this paper we propose a new measure for systemic risk: the Financial Risk Meter (FRM). This measure is based on the penalization parameter () of a linear quantile lasso regression. The FRM is calculated by taking the average of the penalization parameters over the 100 largest US publicly...

Information technology is increasingly facilitating mechanisms by which information asymmetry between lenders and borrowers in the financial sector can be reduced in order to enhance financial access for human and economic development in developing countries. We examine conditional financial...