We address the paradox that financial innovations aimed at risk-sharing appear to have made the world riskier. Financial innovations facilitate hedging idiosyncratic risks among agents; however, aggregate risks can be hedged only with liquid assets. When risk-sharing is primitive, agents...

We study the period of the COVID-19 pandemic to assess the impact of foreign institutional investor (FII) flows on asset prices in an emerging market. Using a dataset of stock-level foreign fund flows of Indian equities, we show that stocks experiencing abnormally high innovations in foreign...

This paper assesses the impact of introducing an efficient payment system on the amount of credit provided by the banking system. Two channels are investigated. First, innovations in wholesale payments technology enhance the security and speed of deposits as a payment medium for customers and...

This paper discusses Islamic banking products and interprets them in the context of financial intermediation theory. Anecdotal evidence shows that many of the conventional products can be redrafted as Sharia-compliant products, so that the differences are smaller than expected. Comparing...

Using a multi-country panel of banks, the authors study whether better capitalized banks fared better in terms of stock returns during the financial crisis. They differentiate among various types of capital ratios: the Basel risk-adjusted ratio; the leverage ratio; the Tier I and Tier II ratios;...