The recent literature on law and finance has drawn attention to the importance of creditor rights in influencing the development of financial systems and in affecting firm corporate governance and financing patterns. Recent financial crises have also highlighted the importance of insolvency...

Enforcement more than regulations, laws-on-the-books, or voluntary codes is key to effective corporate governance, at least in transition and developing countries. Corporate governance and enforcement mechanisms are intimately linked as they affect firms'ability to commit to their stakeholders,...

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....

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...

Drawing on country experience, the authors analyze alternative frameworks for providing financial services. Scope of permissible activities: The integrated banking model (commercial banking fully integrated with other financial services, including investment banking) benefits both financial...

The 1992 Czechoslavakia mass privatization program involving about 1,500 eneterprises and implemented through a voucher scheme with competitive bidding was a bold step in changing the ownership and governance of a large part of the economy. It represents a clear test case of one approach, and...

For a large number of companies from different countries, the authors analyze how company corporate governance practices and country regulatory regimes interact in terms of company valuation. They confirm that corporate governance plays a crucial role in efficient company monitoring and...

The internationalization of financial services -- eliminating discrimination between the treatment of foreign and domestic providers of financial services and removing barriers to the cross-border provision of financial services -- is of global interest, especially in Asia. Most of Asia limits...

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 more...

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...