Consumer protection and financial literacy are essential pillars of a well functioning and stable financial system. As the global financial crisis demonstrated, inadequate attention to consumer protection and financial literacy can lead to financial instability. Though Shari'ah principles...

Credit rating agencies face a difficult trade-off between delivering both accurate and stable ratings. In particular, its users have consistently expressed a preference for rating stability, driven by the transactions costs induced by trading when ratings change frequently. Rating agencies...

This paper examines the financial stability implications arising from securitization markets, with one eye on the past and another on the future. The paper begins by deriving a number of “lessons learned” based on an examination of key industry developments in the years before the crisis....

We find that Credit Rating Agencies (CRA)'s opinions have an impact in the cost of funding of sovereign issuers and consequently ratings are a concern for financial stability. While ratings produced by the major CRAs perform reasonably well when it comes to rank ordering default risk among...

Traditional bank competition policy seeks to balance efficiency with incentives to take risk. The main tools are rules guiding entry/exit and consolidation of banks. This paper seeks to refine this view in light of recent changes to financial services provision. Modern banking is largely...

The global economy is in the midst of an unprecedented slump caused by the coronavirus pandemic. This systemic risk like no other at a time of record-breaking debt levels, especially among nonfinancial firms across the world, could exacerbate corporate vulnerabilities, deepen macro-financial...

The global economy is in the midst of an unprecedented slump caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. To assess the likely evolution of nonfinancial corporate performance going forward, this paper investigates empirically the impact of past pandemics using firm-level data on more than 537,000 companies...

This paper presents new evidence on the empirical relationship between bank solvency and funding costs. Building on a newly constructed dataset drawing on supervisory data for 54 large banks from six advanced countries over 2004-2013, we use a simultaneous equation approach to estimate the...

The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) triggered a sharp contraction of economic activity across Asia and the Pacific. Policymakers adopted a 'whatever it takes' approach in their initial response, relying mainly on liquidity support to help firms survive the shock. This paper discusses how the...

We examine the effect of bank capital levels on firm investment drawing on a sample of 11,106 non-financial firms from 2007 to 2013 in 16 advanced economies. We examine two measures of bank capital adequacy, the Tier 1 ratio and a simple leverage ratio, and find that firms with larger external...