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...

This report—the product of a joint working group convened by the Center for Global Development and the Inter-American Development Bank—focuses on firms and labor markets in Latin America and the Caribbean during the COVID-19 crisis and the highly uncertain recovery phase now underway. The ongoing Ru...

A well-known structural problem in Latin America is that firms are generally quite small and most workers in the region are concentrated in small firms. In recent years, about 32 percent of workers were self-employed, and of those working in firms, over 50 percent were in firms that employed 10 or f...