Although cross-border bank lending has fallen sharply since the crisis, extending our bank ownershipdatabase from 1995-2009 up to 2013 shows only limited retrenchment in foreign bank presence. Whilebanks from OECD countries reduced their foreign presence (but still represent 89% of foreign bank...

We construct an extensive database of domestic financial reforms spanning 90 countries from 1973 to 2014. Utilizing this dataset, we estimate a structural model that incorporates various factors identified in the existing literature to explain the global contagion of financial reforms. Our...

This paper investigates the consequences of global shocks on a sample of low- and lower-middle-income countries with a particular focus on fragile and conflict-affected states (FCS). FCS are a group of countries that display institutional weakness and/or are negatively affected by active...

The inclusiveness of growth depends on the extent of access to economic and social opportunities. This paper applies the concept of social opportunity function to ascertain the inclusiveness of growth episodes in selected African countries. Premised on the concept of social welfare function,...

The growth literature has had problems explaining the ""sub-Saharan African growth dummy"" in cross-country regressions. Instead of taking the usual approach of focusing on long-run growth and assuming that sub-Saharan countries have homogenous parameters in growth regressions, we concentrate...

This paper considers two empirical questions about tax incentives: (1) are incentives used as tools of tax competition and (2) how effective are incentives in attracting investment? To answer these, we prepared a new dataset of tax incentives in over 40 Latin American, Caribbean and African...