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WORKING PAPERS
April 04, 2024
Star firms, defined as the top 10 percentile of firms in the world in terms of return on invested capital, are more likely to occur in high-income countries and manufacturing industry, but there is an increasing share of star firms from middle-income countries and the services sector. Star firms hav...
Blog Post
April 04, 2024
A large academic and policy debate has focused on the increase in market concentration over the past few decades which has given rise to “star firms,” a small set of firms that generate abnormal returns for their investors. A common concern is that these firms exert excess market power and behave as...
Blog Post
October 11, 2023
Budget support offers direct financing to a country’s treasury to create more “fiscal space” for public programs. It has constituted some 14 percent of ODA on average, increasing to over 20 percent in times of crisis. No aid modality is more controversial. Critics argue that, without earmarking fund...
WORKING PAPERS
September 22, 2023
Using new data from the European Banking Authority on loan recovery outcomes, we examine how variation in loan recovery efficiency affects the transmission of financial sector and overall economic weakness to firm-level financial and real outcomes. We find that firms linked to under-capitalized bank...
Blog Post
May 02, 2023
In an attempt to curtail corruption countries have implemented public sector reforms to increase the wages of government officials. However, the evidence on the effectiveness of such interventions on corruption is mixed. In a recent paper, we find that differences in public sector wage inequality pl...
WORKING PAPERS
May 02, 2023
Wage inequality in the public sector is an important determinant of the effectiveness of anti-corruption policies. Increasing the wages of public officials could help reduce corruption in countries with low public sector wage inequality, but in countries where public sector wages are highly unequal,...
Blog Post
April 26, 2023
The COVID-19 pandemic caused a sharp reduction of economic activity in the first months of 2020, which negatively affected the revenues, liquidity, and, potentially, the solvency of many firms. In response to this crisis, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced the Pandemic Emergency Purchase Prog...
WORKING PAPERS
April 26, 2023
This paper finds that shareholders of highly leveraged firms benefit relatively less compared to bondholders from the corporate quantitative easing (QE) announcements by the European Central Bank and the Bank of England in March 2020, as evidence of debt overhang. Firms more heavily impacted by the ...