Chile's success with pension reform in the early 1980s and the continuing financial pressures facing the social security systems of many developing (and some industrial) countries have elicited considerable interest in the mechanics of pension systems that are based on fully funded individual...

Basis risk is the risk attributable to uncertain movements in the spread between yields associated with a particular financial instrument or class of instruments, and a reference interest rate over time. There are seven types of basis risk: Yields on 1) Long-term versus short-term financial...

Subsidized formal credit to the agricultural sector has been advocated as more efficient, equitable, and easier to implement than, say, land reform. But the record on subsidized credit to farmers is dismal. It shows a significant failure either to achieve an increase of agricultural output...

The Bank's draft Operational Directive on Financial Sector Operations requires the adjustment of financial statements in countries where the cumulative inflation rate over three years approaches or exceeds 100 percent. Financial statements in those countries are to follow the accounting...

This paper examines the impact of bank regulations, concentration, inflation, and national institutions on bank net interest margins using data from over 1,400 banks across 72 countries while controlling for bank-specific characteristics. The data indicate that tighter regulations on bank entry...

This paper describes the index-based livestock insurance program in Mongolia designed in the context of a World Bank lending operation with Government of Mongolia and implemented on a pilot basis in 2005. This program involves a combination of self-insurance by herders, market-based insurance,...

There has been little empirical work on the effectiveness of safety nets designed for banks, for lack of data on safety net design across countries. The authors examine cross-country data on bank-level interest expense and deposit growth for evidence of market discipline in individual countries....

Explicit deposit insurance has been spreading rapidly in recent years, even to countries not advanced in financial and institutional development. Economic theory indicates that deposit insurance design features interact--for good or ill--with country-specific elements of the financial and...

The author aims to provide guidelines for the pricing of deposit insurance in different countries. He presents several methodologies that can be used to set benchmarks for the pricing level of deposit insurance in a country, and quantifies how specific design features affect the cost of deposit...

The authors study the empirical relationship between banking crises and financial liberalization using a panel of data for 53 countries for 1980-95. They find that banking crises are more likely to occur in liberalized financial systems. But financial liberalization's impact on a fragile banking...