Although the worldwide growth in dollarization of bank deposits has recently slowed, it has already reached very high levels in dozens of countries. Building on earlier findings that allowed the main cross-country variations in the share of dollars to be explained in terms of national policies...

September 2000 - Certain measures add greatly to the fiscal cost of banking crises: unlimited deposit guarantees, open-ended liquidity support, repeated recapitalization, debtor bail-outs, and regulatory forbearance. The findings in this paper tilt the balance in favor of a strict rather than an...

June 2000 - Allowing banks to hold less capital against loans to borrowers who have received a favorable rating by an approved rating agency may result in a rating system that neither reveals risk information about borrowers nor protects the deposit insurance fund. Part of the problem is the...

Hard on the heels of Mexico's crisis in 1994, a wave of financial crises swept across emerging economies - from East Asia and Russia to Brazil - bringing the fragility of banking and finance into unprecedented focus. What has gone wrong? - Caprio and Honohan examine why emerging markets, in...