Drawing on an in-depth governance micro-survey of public officials in Bolivia, we address empirically the question of the relative importance of the various determinants of governance. We find that commonly made inferences about policy based on simple correlation can be highly misleading due to...

We investigate the effect of financial liberalization on the probability of a banking crises in economies with poor transparency We construct a model with imperfect information where banks cannot distinguish between aggregate shocks on the one hand, and government’s policy and firms’...

The authors investigate whether resident enterprise managers have an informational advantage about the countries in which they work. They propose a method for extracting information available to resident managers but unknown to investors and forecasters. They rest their hypothesis of...

The authors investigate how transparency affects the probability of a financial crisis. They construct a model in which banks cannot distinguish between aggregate shocks and government policy, on the one hand, and firm'quality, on the other. Banks may therefore overestimate firms'returns and...

Drawing on an in-depth governance micro-survey of public officials within a country, we address empirically the question of the relative importance of the various determinants of governance. We investigate the causes of poor governance, and show that commonly made inferences about policy based...

Lack of transparency increases the probability of a banking crisis following financial liberalization. In a country where government policy is not transparent, banks may tend to increase credit above the optimal level. - Mehrez and Kaufmann investigate how transparency affects the probability of...