This article analyzes the costs and benefits of different degrees of competition and different configurations of permissible activities in the financial sector and discusses the related implications for regulation and supervision. Theory and experience demonstrate the importance of competition...

Because financial services are highly dependent on technology and well-suited to remote delivery, technological advances and the advent of the Internet are causing dramatic changes in the industry. This revolution could accelerate financial sector development by lowering the costs, increasing...

This article analyzes the costs and benefits of different degrees of competition and different configurations of permissible activities in the financial sector and discusses the related implications for regulation and supervision. Theory and experience demonstrate the importance of competition...

This article analyzes the costs and benefits of different degrees of competition and different configurations of permissible activities in the financial sector and discusses the related implications for regulation and supervision. Theory and experience demonstrate the importance of competition...

This paper studies how institutional factors affect the size and currency composition of government bonds for a large sample of economies. Important for the debate on limiting financial crises, we find that less flexible exchange rate regimes are associated with larger foreign currency bond...

Countries that have experienced banking crises have adopted oneof two distinct approaches toward the resolution of non-performing assets-a centralized or a decentralized solution. A centralized approach entails setting up a government agency-an asset management company-with the full...

The authors analyze the role of institutions in resolving systemic banking crises for a broad sample of countries. Banking crises are fiscally costly, especially when policies like substantial liquidity support, explicit government guarantees on financial institutions’ liabilities, and...

The East Asian crisis began in Thailand in mid-1997 when an ailing financial sector, a slowdown in exports, and large increases in central bank credit to weak financial institutions, triggered a run on the baht. Then the crisis spread to other countries in the region, as common vulnerabilities,...