The global financial crisis has renewed policymakers'' interest in improving the policy framework for financial stability, and an open question is to what extent and in what form should financial stability reports be part of it. We examine the recent experience with central banks'' financial...

To showcase their increasing focus on financial stability, many central banks and other institutions have started publishing regular reports on financial stability. The paper presents a survey of the available financial stability reports, and proposes a framework for assessing such documents. It...

Over the past two decades, there has been a clear trend toward integrating the regulation and supervision of banks, nonbank financial institutions, and securities markets. This paper reviews the international experience with integrated supervision. We survey the theoretical arguments for and...

This paper introduces the Global Financial Development Database, an extensive dataset of financial system characteristics for 205 economies from 1960 to 2010. The database includes measures of (a) size of financial institutions and markets (financial depth), (b) degree to which individuals can...

This paper presents the latest update of the World Bank Bank Regulation and Supervision Survey, and explores two questions. First, were there significant differences in regulation and supervision between crisis and non-crisis countries? Second, what aspects of regulation and supervision changed...

A large body of evidence points to misaligned incentives as having a key role in the run-up to the global financial crisis. These include bank managers' incentives to boost short-term profits and create banks that are “too big to fail,” regulators' incentives to forebear and withhold...

The global financial crisis has given greater credence to the idea that active state involvement in the financial sector can be helpful for stability and development. There is now evidence that, for example, lending by state-owned banks has helped in mitigating the impact of the crisis on...