With few exceptions, mainly in Asia, mutual funds grew explosively in most countries around the world during the 1990s. Equity funds predominated in Anglo-American countries while bond funds predominated in most of Continental Europe, and in middle-income countries. Capital market development...

Non-bank financial intermediaries (NBFIs) comprise a mixed bag of institutions, ranging from leasing, factoring, and venture capital companies to various types of contractual savings and institutional investors (pension funds, insurance companies, and mutual funds). The common characteristic of...

The link between pension reform, and capital market development, has become a perennial question, raised every time the potential benefits, and pre-conditions of pension reform are discussed. The author asks two questions. First, what are the basic"feasibility"pre-conditions for the successful...

The author examines the implications of demutualization of financial exchanges for their roles as self-regulatory organizations. Many regulators and exchanges believe that conflicts of interest increase when exchanges convert to for-profit businesses. Demutualization also changes the nature of...

The oil sector is critical to Ecuador's economy, contributing about 17 percent to the country's GDP. Ecuador began exporting crude oil in 1972 and over the past two and a half decades oil has become the country's most important sector. It is controlled by the government through the public...

The authors address the trading strategies of mutual funds in emerging markets. The data set they develop permits analyses of these strategies at the level of individual portfolios. A methodologically novel feature of their analysis: they disentangle the behavior of fund managers from that of...

Despite its recognized economic and social importance, housing finance often remains underdevelopedin emerging economies. Residential lending remains small, poorly accessible, and depository-based. Lenders remain vulnerable to significant credit, liquidity, and interest rate risks. As a result,...

Evidence about how choice of regulatory regimes affects the level of shareholder risk for the regulated company has traditionally focused on studies in the United Kingdom and the United States. Broad comparisons of price-cap based regimes (as practiced in the UK) with rate-of-return regulation...

The author looks at the development and regulation of the fixed income securities market in the United States. The U.S. fixed income market is one of the oldest and most developed debt markets in the world. It is also one of the most heterogeneous, with the four key market segments-government...

Using U.S. securities markets as a case history, the author explores the role securities markets play in economic development, how they emerge, and how regulation can make them more effective. Why the United States? Two centuries ago, it was a small undeveloped country with serious financial...