The paper is based on a scenario workshop held on January 20, 2009, where leading financial and private sector development experts from IFC, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank discussed the unfolding crisis. This paper is a product of the staff of the Financial and Private...

Access to financing is now widely acknowledged as a path to meaningful economic inclusion and reduction in poverty. Policy efforts to increase access to finance in Pakistan have taken time to bear fruit, but now access is indeed expanding quickly in certain financial sectors (microfinance,...

Dual-class shares have presented a challenge to standard valuation theories, and yet they make up a significant share of the trading volume and market capitalization in a significant number of the world's largest stock exchanges. This descriptive study overviews the incidence of dual-class firms...

The issue of "an appropriate" legal framework, especially in the case of the takeover market, has been poorly studied in the case of emerging markets, yet it is of immediate relevance and practical policymaker interest. The study makes a first attempt to analyze takeover regulations in a...

Somalia has lacked a recognized government since 1991. In extremely difficult conditions the private sector has demonstrated its much vaunted capability to make do. To cope with the absence of the rule of law, private enterprises have been using foreign jurisdictions or institutions to help with...

This paper measures corporate control benefits - the value that dominant vote-holders expropriate from a controlled company to the detriment of other shareholders. Control benefits are extracted from the total value of the votes in the control block, based on a baseline control contest model in...

This paper shows that firm control value for Brazilian listed companies is directly affected by changes in the legal protection for minority shareholders, on a sample of dual-class firms. Control value increases more than twice in the second half of 1997 in response to Law 9457/1997 which...