Whether social transfers should be targeted or universal is an unsolved debate that is particularly relevant for the implementation of social protection schemes in developing countries. While the limited availability of public resources encourages targeting, the difficulty in identifying the...

This paper aims to examine the effect of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) performance on sovereign funding costs, with a focus on emerging countries, especially in Asia. We find that better ESG performance is associated with lower default risk, and therefore lower funding costs. We...

Rapid developments in financial technology (fintech) are expected to contribute to improvements in financial inclusion and well-being. This paper investigates how financial literacy and other factors contributed to the adoption of fintech services in Japan, using data from a survey conducted by...

Financial literacy is gaining increasing importance as a policy objective in many countries. A growing literature has examined the role of financial literacy in an individual's income, saving behavior, and the use of various financial products. However, so far, we are not aware of any studies of...

This paper investigates the role of punctuation in the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending market. Using data from Renrendai, one of the largest P2P lending platforms in the People’s Republic of China, we investigate how the amount of punctuation used in loan descriptions influences the funding...

Financial literacy is gaining increasing importance as a policy objective in many countries. However, internationally comparable information on financial literacy is still scarce. Recently, the Bank of Japan conducted a major survey of financial literacy and financial behavior covering 25,000...

This paper analyzes the approaches adopted by institutional investors to manage climate risk in their portfolios and proposes policies to increase climate awareness in this large segment of the capital markets. Because of their size and their role as conduit of savers' climate concerns to the...

To achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs) as well as the Paris Agreement major investments in renewable energy (RE) production are necessary worldwide. In particular, decentralized, small-scale projects offer copious potential to create energy access as well as to contribute to an...

It is widely believed that the practice of securitization is one of the causes that led to the 2007-08 financial crisis. In this paper, I show that securitized products such as collateralized debt obligations (CDO) are particularly vulnerable to systematic risk and tend to show higher tail risk....

We calculate the return on the major Asian currency denominated long-term government bonds in terms of a basket of the People's Republic of China's (PRC) imports of goods and services, namely the real return on those assets from the PRC's perspective. In the sample period of January 2002 to...