Person:
Demirguc-Kunt, Asli
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Financial Sector Development,
Private Sector Development,
Jobs and Development
Degrees
External Links
Departments
Europe and Central Asia
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
February 1, 2023
Biography
Asli Demirgüç-Kunt is the Chief Economist of the Europe and Central Asia Region of the World Bank. Over her 30-year career in the World Bank, she has also served as the Director of Research, Director of Development Policy, and the Chief Economist of the Finance and Private Sector Development Network, conducting research and advising on financial and private sector development issues. The author of over 100 publications, she has published widely in academic journals and is among the most-cited researchers in the world. Her research has focused on the links between financial development, firm performance, and economic development. Banking and financial crises, financial regulation, access to financial services and inclusion, as well as SME finance and entrepreneurship are among her areas of research. She has also created the Global Financial Development Report series and Global Findex financial inclusion database. She has been the President of the International Atlantic Economic Society (2013-14) and Director of the Western Economic Association (2015-18) and serves on the editorial boards of professional journals. Prior to coming to the Bank, she was an Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in economics from Ohio State University.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 151
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Publication
Bank Regulation and Supervision around the World : A Crisis Update
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-12)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 significantly during the crisis period? The paper finds significant differences between crisis and non-crisis countries in several aspects of regulation and supervision. In particular, crisis countries (a) had less stringent definitions of capital and lower actual capital ratios, (b) faced fewer restrictions on non-bank activities, (c) were less strict in the regulatory treatment of bad loans and loan losses, and (d) had weaker incentives for the private sector to monitor banks' risks. Survey results also suggest that the overall regulatory response to the crisis has been slow, and there is room to improve regulation and supervision, as well as private incentives to monitor risk-taking. Specifically, comparing regulatory and supervisory practices before and after the global crisis, the paper finds relatively few changes: capital ratios increased (primarily among non-crisis countries), deposit insurance schemes became more generous, and some reforms were introduced in the area of bank governance and bank resolution. -
Publication
Rethinking the State's Role in Finance
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-04)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 aggregate credit. But evidence also points to negative longer-term effects of direct interventions on resource allocation and quality of intermediation. This suggests a need to rebalance the state's roles from direct to less direct involvement, as the crisis subsides. The state does have very important roles, especially in providing well-defined regulations and enforcing them, ensuring healthy competition, and strengthening financial infrastructure. One of the crisis lessons is the importance of getting the basics right first: countries with complex but poorly enforced regulations suffered more during the global crisis. Evidence also suggests that instead of restricting competition, the state needs to encourage contestability through healthy entry of well-capitalized institutions and timely exit of insolvent ones. There is also new evidence that supports the state's key role in promoting transparency of information and reducing counterparty risk. The challenge of financial sector policies is to better align private incentives with public interest, without taxing or subsidizing private risk-taking. -
Publication
Incentive Audits : A New Approach to Financial Regulation
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-01)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 information from other regulators in stressful times, and credit rating agencies' incentives to keep issuing high ratings for subprime assets. As part of the response to the crisis, policymakers and regulators also attempted to address some incentive issues, but various outside observers have criticized the response for being insufficient. This paper proposes a pragmatic approach to re-orienting financial regulation to have at its core the objective of addressing incentives on an ongoing basis. Specifically, the paper proposes "incentive audits" as a tool that could help in identifying incentive misalignments in the financial sector. The paper illustrates how such audits could be implemented in practice, and what the implications would be for the design of policies and frameworks to mitigate systemic risks. -
Publication
How Does Deposit Insurance Affect Bank Risk? Evidence from the Recent Crisis
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-12)Deposit insurance is widely offered in a number of countries as part of a financial system safety net to promote stability. An unintended consequence of deposit insurance is the reduction in the incentive of depositors to monitor banks, which leads to excessive risk-taking. This paper examines the relation between deposit insurance and bank risk and systemic fragility in the years leading to and during the recent financial crisis. It finds that generous financial safety nets increase bank risk and systemic fragility in the years leading up to the global financial crisis. However, during the crisis, bank risk is lower and systemic stability is greater in countries with deposit insurance coverage. The findings suggest that the "moral hazard effect" of deposit insurance dominates in good times while the "stabilization effect" of deposit insurance dominates in turbulent times. Nevertheless, the overall effect of deposit insurance over the full sample remains negative since the destabilizing effect during normal times is greater in magnitude compared with the stabilizing effect during global turbulence. In addition, the analysis finds that good bank supervision can alleviate the unintended consequences of deposit insurance on bank systemic risk during good times, suggesting that fostering the appropriate incentive framework is very important for ensuring systemic stability. -
Publication
The Foundations of Financial Inclusion : Understanding Ownership and Use of Formal Accounts
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-12)Financial inclusion -- defined here as the use of formal accounts -- can bring many welfare benefits to individuals. Yet we know very little about the factors underpinning financial inclusion across individuals and countries. Using data for 123 countries and over 124,000 individuals, this paper tries to understand the individual and country characteristics associated with the use of formal accounts and what policies are effective among those most likely to be excluded: the poor and rural residents. The authors find that greater ownership and use of accounts is associated with a better enabling environment for accessing financial services, such as lower account costs and greater proximity to financial intermediaries. Policies targeted to promote inclusion -- such as requiring banks to offer basic or low-fee accounts, exempting some depositors from onerous documentation requirements, allowing correspondent banking, and using bank accounts to make government payments -- are especially effective among those most likely to be excluded. Finally, the authors study the factors associated with perceived barriers to account ownership among those who are financially excluded and find that these individuals report lower barriers in countries with lower costs of accounts and greater penetration of financial service providers. Overall, the results suggest that policies to reduce barriers to financial inclusion may expand the pool of eligible account users and encourage existing account holders to use their accounts to save and with greater frequency. -
Publication
Finance, Inequality, and Poverty: Cross-Country Evidence
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2004-06)While substantial research finds that financial development boosts overall economic growth, the authors study whether financial development is pro-poor: Does financial development disproportionately raise the income of the poor? Using a broad cross-country sample, the authors find that the answer is yes: Financial intermediary development reduces income inequality by disproportionately boosting the income of the poor and therefore reduces poverty. This result is robust to controlling for simultaneity bias and reverse causation. -
Publication
Business Environment and the Incorporation Decision
(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-05)Using firm-level data from 52 countries, the authors investigate how a country's institutions and business environment affect firms' organizational choices and the effects of organizational form on access to finance and growth. They find that businesses are more likely to choose the corporate form in countries with developed financial sectors and efficient legal systems, strong shareholder and creditor rights, low regulatory burdens and corporate taxes, and efficient bankruptcy processes. Corporations report fewer financing, legal, and regulatory obstacles than unincorporated firms, and this advantage is greater in countries with more developed institutions and favorable business environments. The authors find some evidence of higher growth of incorporated businesses in countries with good financial and legal institutions. -
Publication
The Determinants of Financing Obstacles
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2004-02)The authors use survey data on a sample of over 10,000 firms from 80 countries to assess (1) how successful a priori classifications are in distinguishing between financially constrained and unconstrained firms, and (2) more generally, the determinants of financing obstacles of firms. They find that older, larger, and foreign-owned firms report less financing obstacles. Their findings thus confirm the usefulness of size, age, and ownership as a priori classifications of financing constraints, while they shed doubts on other classifications used in the literature. Their results also suggest that institutional development is the most important country characteristic explaining cross-country variation in firms' financing obstacles. -
Publication
Law and Firms' Access to Finance
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2004-01)Why does a country's legal origin influence its firms' access to finance? Using data from over 4,000 firms in 38 countries, the authors show that firms in countries with French legal origin face significantly higher obstacles in accessing external finance than firms in common law countries. Next, their results indicate that French legal origin countries tend to have (1) less adaptable legal systems, as defined by the degree to which case law and principles of equity rather than simply statutory law are accepted foundations of legal decisions, and (2) less politically independent judiciaries, as defined by the degree of tenure of supreme court judges and their jurisdiction over cases involving the government. Finally, the authors find that the adaptability of a country's legal system is more important for explaining the obstacles that firms face in contracting for external finance than the political independence of the judiciary. So, they distinguish among competing explanations of why law matters for financial development by empirically documenting the links running from international differences in legal origin to the operation of the financial system at the firm level. -
Publication
Financial and Legal Constraints to Firm Growth : Does Size Matter?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2002-02)Using a unique firm-level survey data base, covering fifty four countries, the authors investigate whether different financial, legal, and corruption issues that firms report as constraints, actually affect their growth rates. The results show that the extent to which these factors constrain a firm's growth depends very much on its size, and that it is consistently the smallest firms that are most adversely affected by all these constraints. Firm growth is more affected by reported constraints in countries with underdeveloped financial, and legal systems, and higher corruption. So, policy measures to improve financial, and legal development, and reduce corruption are well justified in promoting firm growth, particularly the development of the small, and medium enterprise sector. But the evidence also shows that the intuitive descriptors of an "efficient" legal system, are not correlated with the components of the general legal constraints that predict firm growth. This finding suggests that the mechanism by which the legal system affects firm performance, is not well understood. The authors' findings also provide evidence that the corruption of bank officials, constraints firm growth. This "institutional failure" should be taken into account, when modeling the monitoring role of financial institutions in overcoming market failures due to informational asymmetries.