Policymakers' uneasiness about granting independence to financial sector regulators stems to a large extent from the lack of familiarity with, and elusiveness of, the concept of accountability. This paper gives operational content to accountability and argues that it is possible to do so in a...

The Asian financial crisis marked the beginning of worldwide efforts to improve the effectiveness of financial supervision. However, the crisis that started in 2007?08 was a crude awakening: several of these improvements seemed unable to avoid or mitigate the crisis. This paper brings the first...

Recent financial sector crises and their resolution have raised new issues and provided additional experiences to draw on in the future. Banking sector problems in Russia, Turkey, and a few Latin American countries occurred within the context of highly dollarized economies, high levels of...

In just over a decade after independence, the three Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, have transformed themselves into fully functioning, small open-market economies that will be joining the European Union. Capital Markets and Financial Intermediation in The Baltics analyzes the...