This paper presents a model of bank risk taking and government guarantees. Levered banks take excessive risk, as their actions are not fully priced at the margin by debt holders. The impact of government guarantees on bank risk taking depends critically on the portion of bank investors that can...

The authors examine the factors that influence banks' type of organizational form when operating in foreign markets using an original database of the branches and subsidiaries in Latin America and Eastern Europe of the top 100 international banks. They find that regulation, taxation, the degree...

The authors use survey data on a sample of over 10,000 firms from 80 countries to assess (1) how successful a priori classifications are in distinguishing between financially constrained and unconstrained firms, and (2) more generally, the determinants of financing obstacles of firms. They find...

Which public policies and ownership structures enhance the governance of banks? The authors construct a new database on the ownership of banks internationally and then assess the ramifications of ownership, shareholder protection laws, and supervisory and regulatory policies on bank valuations....

This paper provides a comprehensive, global database of deposit insurance arrangements as of 2013. The authors extend their earlier dataset by including recent adopters of deposit insurance and information on the use of government guarantees on banks' assets and liabilities, including during the...

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...

The authors examine whether financial development boosts the growth of small firms more than large firms and hence provides information on the mechanisms through which financial development fosters aggregate economic growth. They define an industry's technological firm size as the firm size...

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 the authors first estimate for 16 countries a measure...

The authors study differences in the use of two corporate governance provisions - cumulative voting and proxy by mail voting - in a sample of 224 firms located in four Eastern European countries. The report finds a significant relationship between ownership structure, and the use of corporate...

This paper updates the Demirguç-Kunt and Sobaci (2001) cross-country deposit insurance database and extends it in several important dimensions. This new data set identifies both recent adopters and the ones that were not covered earlier due to a lack of data. Moreover, for the first time, it...