This paper explores the building blocks of an institutional framework to govern borrowing by subnational entities to finance infrastructure investment. The framework should help in achieving sustainable financing of development needs and sound management of fiscal risks. Based on international...

As a result of worldwide decentralization, subnational debt is rising. Subnational debt crises in major developing countries in the 1990s have led to strengthened regulatory frameworks for subnational borrowing and insolvency. With the fragility of the global recovery and increasing public debt,...

This paper provides a pragmatic and objective diagnostic approach to the assessment of public investment management systems for governments. Since weaknesses in public investment management can negate the core argument that additional fiscal space allocated to public investments could enhance...

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, interest in systemic risk has surged among academics and policy makers. The mitigation of systemic risk is now widely accepted as the fundamental underlying concept for the design of the post-crisis regulatory agenda. Effective mitigation requires...

This paper compares different fiscal integration schemes on the basis of their ability to finance public investments and resilience to debt distress and contagion. Complete integration schemes, where a central authority chooses the level of public investments with productivity-enhancing...

This paper identifies the international credit channel of monetary policy by analyzing the universe of corporate loans in Mexico, matched with firm and bank balance-sheet data, and by exploiting foreign monetary policy shocks, given the large presence of European and U.S. banks in Mexico. The...

Cash transfers have proliferated in the past decade as key policy instruments to tackle vulnerability and inequality. Payment mechanisms (PMs), the backbone of cash transfers, are the channels through which cash travels from the funding source to the hands of beneficiaries. In theory, the...

This paper provides a comprehensive, global database of deposit insurance arrangements as of 2013. The authors extend their earlier dataset by including recent adopters of deposit insurance and information on the use of government guarantees on banks'assets and liabilities, including during the...

Using firm-level surveys for up to 73 countries, this paper explores the impact of introducing collateral registries for movable assets on firms'access to bank finance. It compares firms'access to bank finance in seven countries that introduced collateral registries for movable assets against...

This paper analyzes the impact of two distinct shocks stemming from the cross-border transmission of the 2007-2009 crisis on credit availability for small firms. The paper uses data from AccessBank Azerbaijan which was affected in its liquidity position during the second and third quarters of...