Despite trade liberalization efforts made by Eurasian countries, the export structure of the region shows significant levels of concentration across export destinations. To shed light on this observation, this research analyzes trade policy barriers in Eurasia, East Asia and the Pacific, and the...

This paper evaluates a youth internship program in the Republic of Yemen that provided firms with a 50 percent subsidy to hire recent graduates of universities and vocational schools. The first round of the program took place in 2014 and required both firms and youth to apply for the program....

Matching grants are one of the most common types of private sector development programs used in developing countries. But government subsidies to private firms can be controversial. A key question is that of additionality: do these programs get firms to undertake innovative activities that they...

This paper studies the extent to which access to domestic and international bond markets and syndicated loan markets and switches across them impact corporate debt maturity. Using world issuance activity during 1991-2014, the paper shows that different markets provide financing at different...

This paper documents how economies in the East Asia and Pacific (EAP) region have integrated financially with the rest of the world since the 1990s. First, the region is increasingly more connected with itself and with other economies. Although economies in the North capture the bulk of the...

How many and which firms issue equity and bonds in domestic and international markets, how do these firms grow relative to non-issuing firms, and how does firm performance vary along the firm size distribution? To evaluate these questions, a new data set is constructed by matching data on...

This paper describes how Latin America and the Caribbean has been integrating financially with countries in the North and South since the 2000s. The paper shows that the region is increasingly more connected with the rest of the world, even relative to gross domestic product. The region's...

Financial globalization has gathered attention since the early 1990s because of its macro-financial implications and growing importance. But financial globalization has taken shape via different forms over time. This paper examines two important, concurrent dimensions of financial globalization:...

This paper documents to what extent firms from developing countries borrow short versus long term, using data on corporate bond and syndicated loan markets. Contrary to claims in the literature based on firm balance sheets, firms from developing countries borrow through bonds and syndicated...

This paper shows new empirical regularities indicating that the structure of trade connections affects the trade-growth nexus. System generalized method of moments estimations indicate that key structural features associated with the composition of traded products and partners matter for growth....