Politics and regulatory capture can play an important role in financial institutions distress. East Asia's financial crisis featured many distressed and closed financial intermediaries in an environment with many links between government, politicians, supervisors, and financial institutions....

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...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the macroeconomic implications of financial imperfections. It focuses on two major channels through which financial imperfections can affect macroeconomic outcomes. The first channel, which operates through the demand side of finance...

This paper surveys the literature on the linkages between asset prices and macroeconomic outcomes. It focuses on three major questions. First, what are the basic theoretical linkages between asset prices and macroeconomic outcomes? Second, what is the empirical evidence supporting these...

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...

The development of government bond markets and, in particular, their currency composition have recently received much interest, partly because of their relation with financial crises. The authors study the determinants of the size and currency composition of government bond markets for a panel...

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'...

While institutional differences have been found to affect country growth patterns, much has remained unexplained, including how economic actors "overcome" institutional weaknesses and how internationalization helps or hinders development. Banking is an institutionally-intensive activity and the...

The authors study international financial integration analyzing firms from various countries raising capital, trading equity, and cross-listing in major world stock markets. Using a large sample of 39,517 firms from 111 countries covering the period 1989-2000, they find that, although...