How does a country's legal and regulatory framework affect the sustainability of microfinance? Does a tiered approach to regulation help to integrate microfinance into the formal financial system? And are there lessons to be learned from the experience of Ghana and the Philippines with a tiered...

This paper argues that contractual savings (assets of pension funds and life insurance companies) contribute to the improvemnet of banks' efficiency, credit, and liquidity risk. The authors use bank level panel data across countries to assess the impact of contractual savings on bank efficiency...