Many countries rely heavily on patients' out-of-pocket payments to providers to finance their health care systems. This prevents some people from seeking care and results in financial catastrophe and impoverishment for others who do obtain care. Surveys in eighty-nine countries covering 89 percent of the world's population suggest that 150 million people globally suffer financial catastrophe an...

Property market busts are usually implicated in some way in episodes of financial instability. The losses on US mortgages that sparked the recent financial crisis are a good example of this connection, as are the episodes in Japan, Scandinavia and Australia in the early 1990s, which largely stemmed from commercial property lending. One might think property loans should be fairly safe, given the...

Now is the time for global banks to strengthen their core. By implementing or converting to a new core banking platform, or upgrading to the latest version of their current system, financial institutions can create a simpler and more flexible IT environment, boost their efficiency and drive down total cost of ownership. New core banking systems also can add speed and responsiveness, and enhance...

Many of the origins of the recent financial crisis were in the United States, beginning with subprime mortgages and mortgage securities. As the crisis spread globally, few market participants or regulatory authorities saw it coming, and all underestimated its severity. In the United States, the crisis has sparked many proposals to address its perceived causes and prevent a recurrence. Proposals...

Are market-based or bank-based financial systems better at financing the expansion of industries that depend heavily on external finance? Are marketor bank-based financial systems better at facilitating the formation of new firms? We find evidence for neither the market-based nor the bank-based hypothesis. We find overwhelming evidence that industries that are heavily dependent on external fina...