Working Papers
January 1, 0001
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January 1, 0001
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January 1, 0001
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January 1, 0001
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January 1, 0001
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2002
September 1, 2002
Crisis Prevention and Crisis Management: The Role of Regulatory Governance
Description: Good regulatory governance in the financial system is a critical component of financial stability. Research on the topic has not been very systematic and deep. This paper first defines four key components of regulatory governance-independence, accountability, transparency, and integrity. It explores the quality of regulatory governance based on the financial system evaluations under the Financial Sector Assessment Programs (FSAPs), which are the first and most comprehensive effort to analyze regulatory governance issues. In terms of independence, banking supervisors are ahead of the others, while securities regulators perform better on transparency. Insurance regulators are weak in all the regulatory governance components. On the whole, regulators still have a long way to go in terms of practicing good governance. The paper also discusses governance issues specific to crisis management and concludes with an agenda for further research.
September 1, 2002
The Role of Private Sector Annuities Markets in an Individual Accounts Reform of a Public Pension Plan
Description: Pension reforms that establish individual accounts will diminish the relative importance of the traditional state pension while creating a significant role for individual accounts in providing income for retirement. This paper surveys the policy issues this new role entails. It offers general advice to countries considering such issues as the restrictions to be placed on the timing, extent, and form of withdrawals from individual accounts and the need for mandatory annuitization (conversion into annuities) of accumulated account balances. The paper also considers the role that private annuity markets should play and related regulatory, social safety net, tax, and administrative questions.
September 1, 2002
Growth in Switzerland: Can Better Growth Be Sustained?
Description: Swiss growth performance in the past quarter century has been mediocre. The paper finds that conditional income convergence contributes significantly to slow growth and the poor performance of the domestically oriented sectors has been a drag on growth. However, slow growth is not inescapable. Faster growth would require raising total factor productivity growth, which remains low by international standards, and the investment rate. Further progress in structural reform could sustain the underlying growth rate at about 2 percent in the next few years.
September 1, 2002
The Rise in Comovement Across National Stock Markets: Market Integration or Global Bubble?
Description: The degree of comovement across national stock markets has increased dramatically since the mid-1990s. This has overturned a stylized fact in the international portfolio diversification literature that diversifying across countries is more effective for risk reduction than diversifying across industries. We investigate if this rise in comovement is a permanent phenomenon driven by greater economic and financial integration, or a temporary effect associated with the recent stock market bubble. At the global level, our results point to the bubble. At a regional level, we find evidence of a significant rise in market integration within Europe, possibly a reflection of institutional changes such as the EMU.
September 1, 2002
Determinants of Commercial Bank Performance in Transition: An Application of Data Envelopment Analysis
Description: Banking sectors in transition economies have experienced major transformations throughout the 1990s. While some countries have been successful in eliminating underlying distortions and restructuring their financial sectors, in some cases financial sectors remain underdeveloped and the rates of financial intermediation continue to be low. We estimate indicators of commercial bank efficiency by applying a version of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to bank-level data from a wide range of transition countries. In addition to stressing the importance of some bank-specific variables, the censored Tobit analysis suggests that (1) foreign ownership with controlling power and enterprise restructuring enhances commercial bank efficiency; (2) the effects of prudential tightening on the efficiency of banks vary across different prudential norms; and (3) consolidation is likely to improve the efficiency of banking operations. Overall, the results confirm the usefulness of DEA for transition-related applications and shed some light on the question of the optimal architecture of a banking system.