The ability of consumers to make informed financial decisions improves their ability to develop sound personal finance. This paper uses a panel dataset from Russia, an economy in which consumer loans grew at an astounding rate - from about US$10 billion in 2003 to over US$170 billion in 2008 -...

We use an experiment with commercial bank loan officers to test how performance based compensation affects risk-assessment and lending. High-powered incentives lead to greater screening effort and more profitable lending decisions. This effect, however, is muted by deferred compensation and...

We find that in 1989-1996, when U.S. monetary policy tightly targeted overnight fed funds rates, the volatility and persistence of spreads between target and term fed funds levels were larger for longer-maturity loans. We show that such patterns are consistent with an expectational model where...

Using a comprehensive database of firms in Western and Eastern Europe, we study how the business environment in a country drives the creation of new firms. Our focus is on regulations governing entry. We find entry regulations hamper entry, especially in industries that naturally should have...

We employ a novel dataset on almost 30,000 trade credit contracts to describe the broad characteristics of the parties that contract together, the key contractual terms such as the discount for early payment and the days by when payment is due. Whereas prior work has typically used information...

The recent financial crisis has shown how interconnected the financial world has become. Shocks in one location or asset class can have a sizable impact on the stability of institutions and markets around the world. But systemic risk analysis is severely hampered by the lack of consistent data...

This paper investigates stock performance in emerging markets in relation to their accessibility by foreign investors (as measured by the investability index of the IFC). Using the Stehle (1977) model, we reject for most markets integration and fail to reject for all segmentation. We find that...

We review the literature on resolving bank and corporate sector crises to identify government policies that affect the depth of a crisis and the ease and sustainability of recovery, and to analyze their fiscal cost. A consistent framework - including sufficient resources for loss-absorption and...

Using accounting data for 7722 non-financial firms in 42 countries, we examine how the 2007-2009 crisis affected firm performance and how various linkages propagated shocks across borders. We isolate and compare effects from changes in external financing conditions, domestic demand, and...