This paper documents and assesses the risk stemming from rising corporate indebtedness in China using a firm-level dataset of listed firms. It finds that while leverage on average is not high, there is a fat tail of highly leveraged firms accounting for a significant share of total corporate...

This paper assesses the scope and coverage of quasi-fiscal activities (QFAs) in Ghana. We find that while QFAs have been reduced recently, they remain significant. The extensive nature of these activities has several macroeconomic and structural policy implications. An extended measure of public...

China’s residential real estate sector plays an important role in the economy and has been a key driver of growth. Since 2014 the sector has softened visibly, reflecting overbuilding across many cities. An orderly adjustment of the sector is welcome. The key questions are how severe the...

Widespread implicit guarantees and interest ceilings were major distortions in China's financial system, contributing to a misallocation of resources. We analyze the impact of removing such frictions in a general equilibrium setting. The results show that comprehensive reforms generate better...

Using a new daily index of social unrest, we provide systematic evidence on the negative impact of social unrest on stock market performance. An average social unrest episode in an typical country causes a 1.4 percentage point drop in cumulative abnormal returns over a two-week event window....

This paper examines the impact of the recent global crisis on emerging market economies (EMs). Our cross-country analysis shows that the impact of the crisis was more pronounced in those EMs that had initial weaker fundamentals and greater financial and trade linkages. This effect is observed...