Building resilience to natural disasters is imperative for sustainable private sector development and growth in Malaysia. Floods have been Malaysia’s most frequent natural disaster, accounting for 85 percent...
Global growth has slowed markedly, edging closer to falling into recession. Meanwhile, growth in the East Asia and Pacific (EAP) region, excluding China rebounded, diverging from the global trend, as mobility...
Climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts are urgently needed across Southeast Asia. The region has some of the most greenhouse gas (GHG)-intensive economies in the world. The financial sector can...
The objectives of this paper are to take stock of the available fintech-related data, to document patterns of fintech activity across the world, and to help identify enabling factors. Fintech has seen...
Using country-to-country data, this paper documents a set of novel stylized facts about the rise of the South in global finance. The paper assembles comprehensive bilateral data on cross-border bank loans...
This paper studies whether there is a connection between finance and growth at the firm level. It employs a new dataset of 150,165 equity and bond issuances around the world, matched with income and balance...
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic halted economic activity worldwide, hurting firms and pushing many of them toward bankruptcy. This paper discusses four central issues that have emerged in the academic...
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has imposed a heavy toll on economies worldwide, nearly halting economic activity. Although most firms should be viable when economic activity resumes, cash flows have...
This paper studies how crises prompted firms to switch borrowing across markets, impacting the amount borrowed, maturity, and currency denomination at the firm and aggregate levels. Using data on worldwide...
This paper investigates the sources of capital misallocation across a group of 11 developing and developed countries. The main findings are (i) technological frictions, namely, adjustment costs and uncertainty...
It is generally believed that firms in emerging markets rely on shorter-term instruments than firms in advanced economies. In recent years, firms in emerging market economies have substantially increased...
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...
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...
This paper studies how access to different markets and crises impact debt financing and maturity. Using data on worldwide corporate issuance activity in domestic and international bond and syndicated loan...
This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of how economies in the East Asia and Pacific (EAP) region have been integrating financially with the rest of the world since the 1990s, using bilateral data...
A synchronous growth slowdown has been underway in emerging markets (EM) since 2010. Growth in these countries is now markedly slower than, not just the pre‐crisis average, but also the long‐term average...
The world economy is not what it used to be twenty years ago. For most of the 20th century, the world economy was characterized by developed (North) countries acting as 'center' to a 'periphery' of developing...
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?...
The world economy is not what it used to be twenty years ago. For most of the 20th century, the world economy was characterized by developed (North) countries acting as 'center' to a 'periphery' of developing...
The world economy is not what it used to be twenty years ago. For most of the 20th century, the world economy was characterized by developed (North) countries acting as 'center' to a 'periphery' of developing...