The rise of shadow banking and attendant financial fragility in China can be traced to intensified deposit competition following the global financial crisis (GFC). Deposit competition intensified after the GFC because the GFC slowed down banks' deposit growth from cross-border money inflows and...

We build a granular Geographic Information System (GIS) database that covers China's national highways, modern motorways, traditional railways, high-speed railways, and waterways at an annual frequency from 1993 to 2020. After describing the database and its construction, we characterize the...

We provide a comprehensive review of China's financial system, and explore directions of future development. First, the financial system has been dominated by a large banking sector. In recent years banks have made considerable progress in reducing the amount of non-performing loans and...

With extensive country- and firm-level data sets we first document that the financial sectors of most sub-Saharan African countries remain significantly underdeveloped by the standards of other developing countries. We also find that population density appears to be considerably more important...

We examine empirically how legal origin, creditor rights, property rights, legal formalism, and financial development affect the design of price and non-price terms of bank loans in almost 60 countries. Our results support the law and finance view that private contracts reflect differences in...

We develop a model where institutions form connections through swaps of projects in order to diversify their individual risk. These connections lead to two different network structures. In a clustered network groups of financial institutions hold identical portfolios and default together. In an...

In recent years, there has been a large literature on how stock exchange specialists set prices when there are investors who know more about the stock than they do. An important assumption in this literature is that there are *liquidity traders* who are equally likely to buy or sell for...

There has been a long-running debate about whether stock market prices are determined by fundamentals. To date no consensus has been reached. An important issue in this debate concerns the circumstances in which deviations from fundamentals are consistent with rational behavior. A...