New research on urban air pollution casts doubt on the conventional view of the relationship between economic growth and environmental quality. This view holds that pollution automatically increases until societies reach middle-income status because poor countries have neither the institutional...

Politics and regulatory capture can play an important role in financial institutions'distress. East Asia's financial crisis featured many distressed and closed financial intermediaries in an environment with many links between government, politicians, supervisors, and financial institutions....

For a large number of companies from different countries, the authors analyze how company corporate governance practices and country regulatory regimes interact in terms of company valuation. They confirm that corporate governance plays a crucial role in efficient company monitoring and...

This paper reviews the evidence on the importance of finance for economic well-being, provides data on the degree of use of basic financial services by households and firms across a sample of countries, assesses the desirability of more universal access, and overviews the macroeconomic, legal,...

The authors analyze how property rights affect the allocation of firms'available resources among different types of assets. In particular, they investigate empirically for a large number of countries whether firms in environments with more secure property rights allocate available resources more...

Enforcement more than regulations, laws-on-the-books, or voluntary codes is key to effective corporate governance, at least in transition and developing countries. Corporate governance and enforcement mechanisms are intimately linked as they affect firms'ability to commit to their stakeholders,...

New data from the 2008 World Bank Group Entrepreneurship Survey indicates a very strong and statistically significant relationship between entrepreneurship and a better business environment. Data for 100 countries on the number of total and newly registered corporations over an eight-year period...

This paper addresses two vital concerns in the debate on adaptation to climate change. First, how can countries prepare to manage the impact of climate-change induced natural disasters? Second, how can countries ensure that they have the governmental institutions required to manage the...

This paper reports on the 2009 update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism,...

This paper presents new indicators for 185 economies measuring the accessibility of business regulatory information. The paper shows that the new data can serve as meaningful proxies for the overall transparency of governments and the new data have explanatory power for the quality of business...