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...

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 examine whether financial development boosts the growth of small firms more than large firms and hence provides information on the mechanisms through which financial development fosters aggregate economic growth. They define an industry's technological firm size as the firm size...

The relationships among competition in the financial sector, access of firms to external financing, and associated economic growth are ambiguous in theory. Moreover, measuring competition in the financial sector can be complex. In this paper the authors first estimate for 16 countries a measure...

This paper updates the Demirguç-Kunt and Sobaci (2001) cross-country deposit insurance database and extends it in several important dimensions. This new data set identifies both recent adopters and the ones that were not covered earlier due to a lack of data. Moreover, for the first time, it...

Which public policies and ownership structures enhance the governance of banks? The authors construct a new database on the ownership of banks internationally and then assess the ramifications of ownership, shareholder protection laws, and supervisory and regulatory policies on bank valuations....

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 support, explicit government guarantees on financial institutions liabilities, and...