"The authors seek to identify factors that influence decisions about a country's financial safety net, using a new dataset on 170 countries covering the 1960-2003 period. Specifically, they focus on how outside influences, economic development, crisis pressures, and political institutions affect...

"The intensity of recent turbulence in financial markets has surprised nearly everyone. This paper searches out the root causes of the crisis, distinguishing them from scapegoating explanations that have been used in policy circles to divert attention from the underlying breakdown of incentives....

"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...

"There is a wide cross-country variation in the institutional structure of bank failure resolution, including the role of the deposit insurer. The authors use quantitative analysis for 57 countries and discuss specific country cases to illustrate this variation. Using data for over 1,700 banks...

"Drawing on the recent literature on economic institutions and the origins of economic development, the authors offer a political economy explanation of why institution building has varied so much across transition economies. They identify dependence on natural resources and the historical...

"The relationships among competition in the financial sector, access of firms to external financing, and associated economic growth are ambiguous in theory. Moreover, measuring competition in the financial sector can be complex. In this paper Claessens and Laeven first estimate for 16 countries...