Individuals and business owners engage in an increasingly complex array of financialdecisions that are critical for their success and well-being. Yet a growing literature documentsthat in both developed and developing countries, a large fraction of the population is unpreparedto make these...

[...]This article contributes factually to the debate over theopening of emerging markets to foreign participation byexploring the experiences of Argentina and Mexico—two markets that exhibit a significant degree and duration offoreign bank activity.We begin our analysis by presenting the...

This paper provides an overview of the complex conceptual and practical challenges thatemerging market economies face as they attempt to reform their frameworks for financialregulation. These economies are striving to balance the quest for financial stability with theimperatives of financial...

The present paper examines the capital structure adjustment dynamics of listed non-financial corporations in seven East Asian countries during 1994-2002. Compared to firms in the least affected countries, average leverages were much higher among firms in the worst affected countries while the...

Although there has been an intensive debate on the relative merits of different systems of corporate governance, empirical evidence on the link between corporate governance and firm performance almost exclusively refers to the market-oriented Anglo-Saxon system. This paper therefore investigates...

This paper uses firm-level data on 162 large Hungarian enterprises to analyse the relationship betweenownership structure and corporate performance in 1998 and 1999. Cross-sectional regressions are runfor each of these years using the return on assets (ROA) as the measure of performance. Both...

The paper presents early results of the survey of 84 Polish privatised industrial companies, sampled from a list of the 500 biggest firms. Three aspects of corporate governance were analysed: ownership structure, management of the companies, and supervision structures. An attempt was made to...

Vor dem Hintergrund des oft vernachlässigten industriellen Umweltschutzes in Entwicklungsländern entwickelt das Pilotvorhaben zur Unterstützung umweltorientierter Unternehmensführung in Entwicklungsländern (P3U) der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) das Instrument...

Malnutrition and food deprivation, which are concentrated in poor countries, have been along-term concern of economists, but as per capita income in developed countries has grown in the20th century, a new problem of over-nutrition leading to obesity has occurred. This paper developsmodels of...

The paper explores the determinants of up-front fees on sovereign bank loans.Remuneration of bank loans is typically channelled through the floating interestbenchmark, the interest spread, and a battery of fees. There is substantial evidence of thespread paying for long-run sovereign repayment...