"The author presents evidence that balance sheet effects are critical determinants of both the likelihood of a crisis and of income losses following a crisis. She tests the validity of "insurance" and "liquidity" models of currency crisis. Both models predict that the occurrence of a balance of...

"There is a wide cross-country variation in the institutional structure of bank failure resolution, including the role of the deposit insurer. The authors use quantitative analysis for 57 countries and discuss specific country cases to illustrate this variation. Using data for over 1,700 banks...

"The authors seek to identify factors that influence decisions about a country's financial safety net, using a new dataset on 170 countries covering the 1960-2003 period. Specifically, they focus on how outside influences, economic development, crisis pressures, and political institutions affect...

"Powell, Mylenko, Miller, and Majnoni analyze how data in public credit registries can be used both to strengthen bank supervision and to improve the quality of credit analysis by financial institutions. Empirical tests using public credit registry (PCR) data were performed in collaboration with...

"Majnoni, Miller, and Powell propose an integrated approach to minimum bank capital and loan loss reserves regulation. They break new ground in two main areas. First, the authors provide an explicit measurement of the credit loss distribution for a sample of emerging countries providing a...

With the recent stock market frauds in markets around the world such as the Madoff case in the U.S. and the recent Satyam fraud in India, no nation can hold its head high and claim to have good corporate governance. The reality is that the problems of fraud, faulty audits, misleading accounts,...

"This paper illustrates the trends in deposit insurance adoption. It discusses the cross-country differences in design, and synthesizes the policy messages from cross-country empirical work as well as individual country experiences. The paper develops practical lessons from this work and...