Economic activity depends on a flourishing biodiversity and intact environment through the provision of ecosystem services. The depletion of these services poses physical risks for the financial sector. This paper attempts to measure the potential exposure of the banking systems in 20 emerging...

Minimizing the adverse social and economic consequences of the energy transition is an important social aspiration. It is the essence of the "just transition," the connective tissue that binds together climate goals with social outcomes centered around jobs. This policy note proposes the first...

Recent calls on central banks and financial regulators to use the tools at their disposal to help mitigate the negative economic and social impacts of climate policies are based on several false analogies between the energy transition and the "just" energy transition. The same false analogies...

Despite far-reaching banking sector reforms over the past few years, financial intermediation in Tajikistan continues to lag behind structural peers and the Caucasus and Central Asia region. At the same time, bank interest rate spreads, a standard measure of financial intermediation costs, have...

The transition to a net-zero economy presents significant social and economic challenges, particularly for industries and regions reliant on high-carbon activities, hence the need for a just transition. This paper examines exposure to just transition risks-a newly introduced category of...

This paper attempts to study the impact of Brazilian Development Bank credit on resource misallocation in Brazil, using manufacturing firm-level data from 2003-14. The paper first estimates measures of resource misallocation based on Hsieh and Klenow (2009), documenting high variation in firms'...

The costs of financial intermediation have important consequences for financial development. Using bank-level data for 160 countries during 2005-14, this paper analyzes the composition and sources of bank net interest margins. First, it uses an accounting decomposition framework to provide...

Theory suggests that the effect of banking market concentration on financial stability is mediated by several competing variables. Using a sample of 68 countries from 1997 to 2015, this paper proposes a unified empirical framework to test for the simultaneous presence and impact of the mediators...

This paper extends the classic Tinbergen rule within the context of financial regulation, explicitly accounting for the inverted U-shaped relationship between market competition and financial stability. Conventional policy frameworks, premised on independent relationships between policy targets...

This paper revisits trends in bank privatization and analyzes their economic impact over the past 25 years. Building on a novel data set of privatization events for 70 developed and developing countries, it shows that bank privatization became more frequent since the Global Financial Crisis,...