Explicit deposit insurance has been spreading rapidly in recent years, even to countries not advanced in financial and institutional development. Economic theory indicates that deposit insurance design features interact--for good or ill--with country-specific elements of the financial 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...

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 distills...

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...

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...

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 author explains how differences in the informational and contracting environments of countries affect the optimal design of their financial safety nets and their optimal strategies for managing financial crises. He explains how to design and operate safety nets at minimum cost to taxpayers...

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....

The Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) database, launched by the World Bank in 2011, provides comparable indicators showing how people around the world save, borrow, make payments, and manage risk. The 2014 edition of the database reveals that 62 percent of adults worldwide have an...

This paper analyzes the reopening process of countries in Europe and Central Asia after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and provides evidence on the effects of different reopening trajectories and their timing and speed on economic recovery. The analysis indicates that countries that...