Payments systems operate virtually unnoticed in our daily lives and yet are crucial to a wellfunctioning economy and financial system. Because they explicitly link financial institutions, payments systems provide a way to transmit risk within, and between, financial systems. Ideally, payments systems should be designed and operated so as not to add risk in the event of a crisis. The author exam...

In this paper, we argue that study of the effect of financial development and shocks on aggregate growth volatility will not be informative because they affect growth volatility through its different components. Financial development affects only the business cycle component of volatility and therefore, the effect on total volatility is dependent on its share in total volatility. On the contrar...

The paper examines the e¤ect of in‡ation on growth in transition countries. It presents panel data evidence for 13 transition countries over the 1990-2003 period; it uses a …xed e¤ects, full-information maximum likelihood, panel approach to account for possible bias from correlations among the unobserved e¤ects and the observed country heterogeniety. The results …nd a strong, robust, negative e...

Using data for 1238 banks located in 94 developing and emerging countries, we explore whether the impact of bank regulation and supervision on banking risk (measured by the banks’ Z-scores) depends on bank structure. Our findings suggest that stricter regulation and supervision increases the banks’ Z-scores. Notably capital requirements and supervisory control diminish banking risk. However, th...

Capital markets perform two distinct functions: provision of capital and facilitation of good governance through information production and monitoring. I argue that the governance function has more impact on the efficiency with which resources are utilized within the firm. Based on industry level data across thirty-eight countries, I present evidence suggesting a positive relation between marke...

Capital markets perform two distinct functions: provision of capital and facilitation of good governance through information production and monitoring. I argue that the governance function has more impact on the efficiency with which resources are utilized within the firm. Based on industry level data across thirty-eight countries, I present evidence suggesting a positive relation between marke...