In many markets, industry and policymakers agree that there may be too many insurers. In others, the consensus is that there could be benefit from more competition. But this broad consensus is often supported by evidence that is more qualitative, anecdotal, or judgmental despite being...

The current account can be understood as the outcome of investment decisions made by domestic and foreign investors. These decisions can be decomposed into a portfolio rebalancing and a portfolio growth component. This paper provides empirical evidence of the importance of portfolio rebalancing...

Microfinance institutions have proved the possibility of providing reliable banking services to poor customers. Their second aim is to do so in a commercially-viable way. This paper analyzes the tensions and opportunities of microfinance as it embraces the market, drawing on a data set that...

An effective tax system is fundamental for successful country development. The first step to understand public revenue systems is to establish some commonly agreed performance measurements and benchmarks. This paper employs a cross-country study to estimate tax capacity from a sample of 104...

Capitalizing on recent improvements in the availability of cross-country financial sector data, this paper proposes a standard methodology for benchmarking the policy component of financial development. Systematic controls are introduced to isolate main structural country characteristics and a...

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 reviews the empirical evidence on the existence of poverty traps, understood as self-reinforcing mechanisms through which poor individuals or countries remain poor. Poverty traps have captured the interest of many development policy makers, because poverty traps provide a...

This paper examines the relationship between regulation and the business interests of President Ben Ali and his family, using firm-level data from Tunisia for 1994-2010. Data on investment regulations are merged with balance sheet and firm-level census data in which 220 firms owned by the Ben...

Implementation arrangements for Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation can be seen as contracts that could address some of the inherent problems with forest carbon credits that often lead to high transaction costs -- measuring, monitoring, and verification....

The global financial crisis and its aftermath have triggered extraordinary policy responses in advanced countries. The impacts of these policy responses?from asset price bubbles to currency depreciations?have often been felt in the developing world. As tapering talk evolves into actual...