This paper provides a comprehensive, global database of deposit insurance arrangements as of 2013. The authors extend their earlier dataset by including recent adopters of deposit insurance and information on the use of government guarantees on banks' assets and liabilities, including during the...

The author uses panel data on 394 firms in 13 developing countries for the years 1988-98 to learn whether financial liberalization relaxes financing constraints on firms. He finds that liberalization affects small and large firms differently. Small firms are financially constrained before...

The author calculates gross safety net subsidies for a large sample of banks in 12 countries, to assess the relationship between the risk-taking behavior of banks, and certain ban characteristics. He finds that gross safety net subsidies are higher for banks that have concentrated ownership,...

The East Asian crisis began in Thailand in mid-1997 when an ailing financial sector, a slowdown in exports, and large increases in central bank credit to weak financial institutions, triggered a run on the baht. Then the crisis spread to other countries in the region, as common vulnerabilities,...

The author examines the effect of product and geographic diversification on firm value for a sample of 1,914 corporations in 18 countries. His results indicate that both product and geographic diversification destroy value at high levels of diversification, suggesting that agency and influence...

Only recently has the debate on bank capital regulation devoted specific attention to the role that bank loan loss provisions can play as part of a minimum capital regulatory framework. Several national regulators have adopted or are planning to introduce a cyclically adjustable requirement for...

The author aims to provide guidelines for the pricing of deposit insurance in different countries. He presents several methodologies that can be used to set benchmarks for the pricing level of deposit insurance in a country, and quantifies how specific design features affect the cost of deposit...

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 whether firms in environments with more secure property rights allocate available resources...

This paper examines the impact of bank regulations, concentration, inflation, and national institutions on bank net interest margins using data from over 1,400 banks across 72 countries while controlling for bank-specific characteristics. The data indicate that tighter regulations on bank entry...

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' banking systems. They then relate this competitiveness measure to indicators of countries'...