This paper finds that shareholder-friendly corporate governance is positively associated with bank insolvency risk, as proxied by the Z-score and the Merton's distance to default measure, for an international sample of banks over the 2004-08 period. Banks are special in that"good"corporate...

An earlier paper showed that an economy could be trapped in an equilibrium state in which the absence of the rule of law led to asset-stripping, and the prevalence of asset-stripping led to the absence of a demand for the rule of law, highlighting a coordination failure. This paper looks more...

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, interest in systemic risk has surged among academics and policy makers. The mitigation of systemic risk is now widely accepted as the fundamental underlying concept for the design of the post-crisis regulatory agenda. Effective mitigation requires...

This paper identifies the international credit channel of monetary policy by analyzing the universe of corporate loans in Mexico, matched with firm and bank balance-sheet data, and by exploiting foreign monetary policy shocks, given the large presence of European and U.S. banks in Mexico. The...

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...

The ease of converting and transferring currency is a crucial consideration for firms investing in a foreign economy. The Converting and Transferring Currency data and indicators measure foreign exchange restrictions most relevant for foreign direct investment across economies to identify common...

Using firm-level surveys for up to 73 countries, this paper explores the impact of introducing collateral registries for movable assets on firms'access to bank finance. It compares firms'access to bank finance in seven countries that introduced collateral registries for movable assets against...

This paper analyzes the impact of two distinct shocks stemming from the cross-border transmission of the 2007-2009 crisis on credit availability for small firms. The paper uses data from AccessBank Azerbaijan which was affected in its liquidity position during the second and third quarters of...

This paper uses a panel of annual observations for 198 banks in 19 Middle East and North Africa countries over 2001-12 to develop an early warning system for forecasting bank insolvency based on a multivariate logistic regression framework. The results show that the traditional CAMEL indicators...

This paper investigates how government interventions into banking systems such as blanket guarantees, liquidity support, recapitalizations, and nationalizations affect banking competition. This debate is important because the pricing of banking products has implications for borrower and...