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,...

"A rapidly growing empirical literature is studying the causes and consequences of bank fragility in contemporary economies. The authors reviews the two basic methodologies adopted in cross-country empirical studies-the signals approach and the multivariate probability model-and their...

"Levy-Yeyati, Martinez Peria, and Schmukler show that systemic risk exerts a significant impact on the behavior of depositors, sometimes overshadowing their responses to standard bank fundamentals. Systemic risk can affect market discipline both regardless of and through bank fundamentals....

"Claessens, Klingebiel, and Laeven 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 support, explicit government guarantees on financial institutions'...

"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...

"The aim of this paper is to understand the mechanism underlying access to credit. Gine focuses on two important aspects of rural credit markets in Thailand. First, moneylenders and other informal lenders coexist with formal lending institutions such as government or commercial banks, and more...

"Access to transfers and credit, whether cash or in-kind, is a major source of poverty alleviation and income generation in many developing countries around the world. Women may especially benefit from transfers and credit in countries such as Bangladesh, where they often have few work...

"The intensity of recent turbulence in financial markets has surprised nearly everyone. This paper searches out the root causes of the crisis, distinguishing them from scapegoating explanations that have been used in policy circles to divert attention from the underlying breakdown of incentives....