We examine the privatization process of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), the largest bank in the world by market capitalization, and its dual IPOs in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Stock exchanges in 2006. The Chinese government retains majority equity ownership of ICBC while...

The conventional wisdom up until the crisis was that efficient financial systems required privately owned banks and financial institutions. The events since 2007 have shown that financial systems such as China's, where banks are government owned but are also publicly listed can have a...

We provide a comprehensive review of China's financial system, and explore directions of future development. First, the financial system has been dominated by a large banking sector. In recent years banks have made considerable progress in reducing the amount of non-performing loans and...

With extensive cross-country datasets and India firm samples, as well as our own surveys of small and medium firms, we examine the legal and business environments, financing channels, and growth patterns of different types of firms in India. Despite the English common-law origin and a...

An interesting aspect of corruption is that its damaging effects on economic performance differ significantly across countries. In this paper, we show that if a central government collects sufficient taxes, it can curtail corruption by paying for performance of local government officials. An...