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,...

"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...

"An apparent temporary narrowing of income inequality has been observed during several recent banking crises. But it would be a mistake to conclude that such crises don't matter for the poor. For one thing, the correlation is not strong, and the opposite pattern has also been present. Besides,...

"Loayza and Rancire study the apparent contradiction between two strands of the literature on the effects of financial intermediation on economic activity. On the one hand, the empirical growth literature finds a positive effect of financial depth as measured by, for instance, private domestic...

"The goals of financial restructuring are to reestablish the creditor-debtor relationships on which the economy depends for an efficient allocation of capital, and to accomplish that objective at minimal cost. Costs include direct costs to taxpayers of financial assistance and the indirect costs...

"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...

The specific objectives of this study are to document, and analyze the extent, and modalities of savings practiced by rural households, and enterprises, identifying the factors that limit, and help explain rural savings in financial form, on the demand, and supply sides, as well as setting forth...

"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...

"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...