For an international sample of banks, the authors construct measures of a bank's absolute size and its systemic size defined as size relative to the national economy. They examine how a bank's risk and return, its activity mix and funding strategy, and the extent to which it faces market...

The authors examine how well several institutional and firm-level factors and their interactions explain firms'perceptions of property rights protection. Their sample includes private and public firms that vary in size from very small to large in 62 countries. Together, the institutional...

The authors document and try to explain the sizable cross-country differences in interest rates on external debt paid by a group of highly indebted developing countries in 1973-89. They find that Indonesia and Turkey, which are often praised for not rescheduling in the 1980s, paid interest rates...

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...

Using a unique firm-level survey data base, covering fifty four countries, the authors investigate whether different financial, legal, and corruptionissues that firms report as constraints, actually affect their growth rates. The results show that the extent to which these factors constrain a...

The empirical literature on finance and development suggests that countries with better developed financial systems experience faster economic growth. Financial development-as captured by size, depth, efficiency, and reach of financial systems-varies sharply around the world, with large...

This paper investigates the impact on the wealth of bank share holders on the transfer of official resources to the debtor countries. The main aim was to derive actual estimates of increases in shareholder wealth following important news concerning future transfers from the multilaterals to the...

Empirical evidence suggests that financial services - such as mobilizing savings, managing risk, allocating resources, and facilitating transactions - influence and are influenced by economic development. And financial crises - widespread bank failures, the collapse of stock markets - can impede...

This study provides evidence that bank characteristics are significant determinants of commercial-bank choice behavior when confronted with a menu of options. It develops a theoretical model of bank choice behavior and empirically tests its implications using data from the 1988 Brazilian...

This paper examines the implications of bank activity and short-term funding strategies for bank risk and returns using an international sample of 1,334 banks in 101 countries leading up to the 2007 financial crisis. Expansion into non-interest income generating activities such as trading...