The ability of the World Bank to strike an appropriate balance between country demands and global goods depends on the institution’s shareholders. Yet, the deterioration in the bilateral relationship between the United States and China now threatens to undermine effective governance at the instituti...

This paper examines the impact of international differences in capital regulation on multinational banks’ loan origination location decisions. We find that greater borrower transparency to a local bank establishment makes loan location at this establishment more likely, and that regulatory arbitrage...

The the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, bank regulators and supervisors in emerging markets should be looking closely at their own banking systems with lessons from Silicon Valley in mind. For most emerging markets, where previous banking crises were devastating and turned back the clock o...

This paper examines the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the reallocation of economic activity across firms, and whether this reallocation depends on the competition environment. The paper uses the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys COVID-19 Follow-up Surveys for about 8,000 firms, including both small...

The large divergence in the returns of top-performing star firms and the rest of the economy is substantially reduced when we account for the mismeasurement of intangible capital. Star firms produce and invest more per dollar of invested capital, have more valuable innovations as measured by the mar...

 Inflation has become a central feature of the global economy. In Latin America (aside from idiosyncratic cases such as Argentina and Venezuela, where high inflation rates have long been the norm), inflation began to rise the first half of 2021, at the same time it did in the US. The fact that risin...