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...

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...

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...

Institutional investors comprise pension funds, insurance companies, and mutual funds. Should a country promote their creation if it lacks well-developed securities markets? The answer to this question, says the author, varies by type of investor. He argues that private pension funds and...

The authors investigate whether firms'access to external financing, to fund growth differs between market-based, and bank-based financial systems. Using firm-level data for forty countries, they compute the proportion of firms in each country that relies on external finance, and examine how that...

Firms often cite financing constraints as one of their primary obstacles to investment. Global capital flows, by bringing in scarce capital, may ease the financing constraints of host country firms. But if incoming foreign investors borrow heavily from domestic banks, foreign direct investment...

The author documents the precise costs of debt and equity issuance, both domestically and internationally, for firms in Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. Costs include investment banking and legal fees, regulatory and exchange listing costs, rating agency fees, and expenditures for marketing and...

The stimulation of private saving is essential to both stabilization and structural adjustment in the transition economies. Private saving in these countries has declined sharply since independence, and this decline has been a factor in the onset of extreme inflation because governments have...

The author investigates whether the credit channel is a key monetary transmission mechanism in the Republic of Korea, especially after its recent financial crisis. To identify the existence of a distinctive credit channel (especially the bank lending channel), he applies two empirical tests to...

Using bank data for 80 countries for 1988-95, the authors show that differences in interest margins and bank profitability reflect various determinants: bank characteristics, macroeconomic conditions, explicit and implicit bank taxes, regulation of deposit insurance, general financial structure,...