Microfinance institutions now serve over 10 million poor households in the developing and developed world, and much of their success has been attributed to their innovative use of peer group lending. There is very little empirical evidence, however, to suggest that group lending schemes offer a...

Recent events, such as the East Asian, Mexican, Scandinavian, and Argentinian crises, have sparked considerable interest in exploring how shocks experienced by one country can spread vis-à-vis real and nominal links to other countries' banking systems. Given the large costs associated with...

The international business literature measures the link between the degree of internationalization (DOI) of a firm's activities and its performance. The results of this literature are mixed. The authors extend the analysis to Canadian bank-level data, but they also take into account the...

The authors examine the characteristics of International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending from the 1960s to 2005. They find that there has been an increase in portfolio concentration, that lending terms have effectively lengthened, and that the proportion of total lending that occurs due to...

The Latin American debt crises in the 1980s and the Asian crisis in the late 1990s both provided impetus for reforming the framework for restructuring sovereign debt. In the late 1980s, the Brady plan established the importance of substantive debt relief in addressing some crises. A decade...

The authors examine the investment behaviour of a sample of small, credit-constrained firms in Sri Lanka. Using a unique panel-data set, they analyze and compare the activities of two groups of small firms distinguished by their different access to financing; one group consists of firms with...

This study examines how family ownership affects the performance and capital structure of 613 Canadian firms using a panel dataset from 1998 to 2005. In particular, we distinguish the effect of family ownership from the use of control-enhancing mechanisms. We find that freestanding family-owned...

The governance challenges facing the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are not simply limited to representation and voice, and the associated question of quota allocation. The author identifies governance issues that hitherto remained largely ignored by the literature and policy-makers alike....

The ongoing review of the IMF, initiated in 2005 by Managing Director De Rato, presents an excellent opportunity to re-examine the role, functions and governance of the Fund. In particular, the objective, scope and conduct of IMF surveillance have been identified as a key area for renewal. In...