Japanese banks are promising sources of capital for developing countries wishing to finance a balance of payments gap. This paper shows that Japanese banks are highly capitalized in terms of market value; much of their capital is"hidden capital,"the divergence between accounting and stock market...

The authors seek to identify factors that influence decisions about a country's financial safety net, using a new dataset on 170 countries covering the 1960-2003 period. Specifically, they focus on how outside influences, economic development, crisis pressures, and political institutions affect...

This paper illustrates the trends in deposit insurance adoption. It discusses the cross-country differences in design, and synthesizes the policy messages from cross-country empirical work as well as individual country experiences. The paper develops practical lessons from this work and distills...

The authors review the literature on term finance to place the research in context and discuss its implications for World Bank operations. Their project investigated whether industrial firms in developing countries suffer from a shortage of long-term credit and whether that shortage affects the...

Improving the supply of long-term credit to industrial firms is considered a priority for growth in developing countries. A World Bank multicountry study looks at whether a long-term credit shortage exists and, if so, whether it has had an impact on investment, productivity, and growth. The...

The authors examine why emerging markets, in particular, are susceptible to and affected by financial difficulties. They show that these difficulties have a richer, more complex structure than they are sometimes believed to have - with marked information asymmetries and substantial volatility....

Most explanations of the crisis of 2007-2009 emphasize the role of the preceding boom in real estate and asset markets in a variety of advanced countries. As a result, an idea that is gaining support among various groups is how to make Basel II or any regulatory regime less pro-cyclical. This...

This paper reassesses what works in banking regulation based on the new World Bank survey (Survey IV) of bank regulation and supervision around world. The paper briefly presents new and official survey information on bank regulations in more than 125 countries, makes comparisons with earlier...

This paper presents new and official survey information on bank regulations in 142 countries and makes comparisons with two earlier surveys. The data do not suggest that countries have primarily reformed their bank regulations for the better over the last decade. Following Basel guidelines many...