Twelve years ago, when I was chief economist of the World Bank, I suggested that the major challenge to development economics was learning the lessons of the previous several decades: a small group of countries, mostly in Asia, but a few in other regions, had had phenomenal success, beyond...

The 2008 financial crisis was followed by a global economic downturn, a credit crunch, and a reduction in cross-border lending, trade finance, and foreign direct investment, which adversely affected businesses around the world. The consequent increase in the number of firm insolvencies in the...

This paper surveys the academic and policy debate on the origins of global imbalances, their prospects after the global crisis, and their policy implications. A conventional view of global imbalances considers them to primarily result from macroeconomic policies and cyclical forces that cause...

[Purpose:] The last four decades have seen the rise of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) as the core locus of transnational accounting regulation. Initial steps of associational cooperation were superseded by establishing a standard setting organization that heavily draws on...

Economic research has shown that debt markets have an information sensitivity property that allows these markets to work properly when price discovery is absent and opaqueness is maintained. Dang, Gorton and Holmström (2015) argue that sufficiently "bad news" can switch debt to become...