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...

East Asia's financial crisis has been attributed in part to the weak performance and risky financial structures of Asian corporations. In the period before Asia's financial crisis, however, analysts were not suggesting that the financial structure of many East Asian corporations would be unable...

The main purpose of this paper is to survey the existing literature on alternative finance (AF) and indicate the major research gaps. In this way, the survey may help to identify the factors influencing the flow of AF; provide analytical, and empirically supported underpinnings for policy work;...

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 Czech Republic's mass-privatization scheme changed the governance of many firms in a short time. The authors show that mass privatization was effective in improving firm management because of the concentrated ownership structure that resulted. For a cross section of 706 firms for the period...

Weaknesses in the corporate sector have increasingly been cited as important factors in financial crises in both emerging markets and industrial countries. Analysts have pointed to weak corporate performance and risky financing patterns as major causes of the East Asian financial crisis. And...

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...

Interest rates fell sharply after Mexico's Brady deal, and private investment and growth recovered. The authors show that the main benefit of debt relief was not to lower expected payments but to reduce uncertainty. Reduced uncertainty was found to be the dominant factor in explaining the...

A group of heavily indebted low-income countries (HIPCs), most in Sub-Saharan Africa, has continued to experience external debt problems. Because the HIPCs'economic characteristics and external imbalances are very different from those of middle-income countries, the analysis of debt problems and...

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,...