Enforcement more than regulations, laws-on-the-books, or voluntary codes is key to effective corporate governance, at least in transition and developing countries. Corporate governance and enforcement...
The authors analyze the role of institutions in resolving systemic banking crises for a broad sample of countries. Banking crises are fiscally costly, especially when policies like substantial liquidity...
This report studies impediments to investment and private sector development in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, and Serbia...
Using bank-level data, the authors apply the Panzar and Rosse (1987) methodology to estimate the extent to which changes in input prices are reflected in revenues earned by specific banks in 50 countries'...
The authors analyze how property rights affect the allocation of firms' available resources among different types of assets. In particular, they investigate empirically for a large number of countries...
The recent literature on law and finance has drawn attention to the importance of creditor rights in influencing the development of financial systems and in affecting firm corporate governance and financing...
The authors study the determinants of the growing migration of stock market activity to international financial centers. They use a sample of 77 countries and document that higher economic growth and more...
Weaknesses in the corporate sector have increasingly been cited as important factors in financial crises in both emerging markets and industrial countries. Analysts have pointed to weak corporate performance...
Politics and regulatory capture can play an important role in financial institutions' distress. East Asia's financial crisis featured many distressed and closed financial intermediaries in an environment...
Drawing on country experience, the authors analyze alternative frameworks for providing financial services. Scope of permissible activities: The integrated banking model (commercial banking fully integrated...
The widespread financial crisis in East Asia caused large economic shocks, which varied by degree across the region. That crisis provides a unique opportunity for investigating the factors that determine...
As many East Asian countries plunged into economic decline, the structure of concentrated ownership and associated corporate governance, along with weak corporate performance, have been blamed for the...
Using data for more than 2,000 companies from nine East Asian economies, the authors examine the interactions between ultimate ownership, group affiliation, and corporate diversification. They find evidence...
The authors identify the ultimate ownership structure for 2,980 corporations in nine East Asian countries. They find that: A) More than half of those firms are controlled be a single shareholder. B) Smaller...
The East Asian financial crisis has been attributed in part to the corporate diversification associated with the misallocation of capital investment toward less profitable and more risky business segments...
East Asia's financial crisis has been attributed in part to the weak performance and risky financial structures of Asian corporations. In the period before Asia's financial crisis, however, analysts were...
The authors assess Thailand's policy options for reducing large corporations' vulnerability to economic shocks and improving their corporate governance - and for providing smaller firms a more stable funding...
The capital flows to Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (CEE/FSU) represent a relatively small, albeit growing share of capital flows to developing countries. Taking all flows together...
The authors test several propositions derived by Shleifer and Vishny (1994, 1996) about how privatization and stabilization (hard budget constraints) affect enterprise behavior. They document the changes...
Banking markets are becoming increasingly international through financial liberalization and general economic integration. Using bank-level data for 80 countries for 1988-95, the authors examine the extent...