We examine the effects of oil rents on corruption and state stability exploiting the exogenous within-country variation of a new measure of oil rents for a panel of 31 oil-exporting countries during the period 1992 to 2005. We find that an increase in oil rents significantly increases...

We use a new dataset on non-resource GDP to examine the performance of commodity-exporting countries in terms of macroeconomic stability and economic growth in a panel of up to 129 countries during the period 1970-2007. Our main findings are threefold. First, we find that overall government...

We analyze holdings of public bonds by over 20,000 banks in 191 countries, and the role of these bonds in 20 sovereign defaults over 1998-2012. Banks hold many public bonds (on average 9% of their assets), particularly in less financially-developed countries. During sovereign defaults, banks...

This paper illustrates how stress tests of banking systems may be designed to evaluate banks' reaction to shocks of increasing intensity, up to the point where regulatory norms are breached, or banks become insolvent. This approach offers useful insight and guidance for regulatory policy and...

The paper finds that, given Australia's conservative approach in implementing the Basel II framework, Australian banks' headline capital ratios underestimate their capital strengths. Given their high capital quality and the progress in their funding profiles since the global financial crisis,...

For almost a decade, the IMF has been using stress tests to identify vulnerabilities across institutions that could undermine the stability of a country's financial system. This working paper focuses on the IMF's experience with stress testing in the Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP)....

In this paper, we survey the rapidly developing literature on macroprudential stress-testing models. The scope of the survey includes models of contagion between banks, models of contagion within the wider financial system including non-bank financial institutions such as investment funds, and...

Developing a systemic liquidity stress testing tool is challenging due to data constraints and hard-to-model behavioral factors. There has yet to be a uniformly accepted model partly because the nature of systemic liquidity risks differs significantly across countries. This paper offers a simple...

Bank stress tests of climate change risks are relatively new, but are rapidly proliferating. The IMF and World Bank staff collaborated to develop an experimental macro scenario stress testing approach to examine physical risks for banks by building a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model...

In coming decades, China will undergo a notable demographic transformation, with its old-age dependency ratio doubling to 24 percent by 2030 and rising even more precipitously thereafter. This paper uses the permanent income hypothesis to reassess national savings behavior, with greater...