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Why was it that the banking system of Australia was more resilient than virtually any other OECD country'? Why the banks in these countries did not take on the increased degree of risk that led to the downfall of so many well-known institutions in the US, the UK and Europe"1 Were Australian bankers, regulators, politicians and investors smarter than their counterparts in the US, the UK and Europe? This paper argues that a more nuanced understanding of structures, institutions and agencies and their interaction can inform research into a specific area, namely the comparative analysis of banking systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The latest financial crisis in the United States and Europe has been followed by calls for tighter regulation of financial intermediaries. We contribute to the literature on financial regulation and banking crises by analyzing an original database of financial regulation and supervision across 60+ countries from 1920 to 2007. This data set includes information on bank supervisory and regulatory agencies--including year of creation, levels of autonomy, institutional characteristics, and relation to central banks and other financial regulatory authorities (insurance and securities)--that allows us to consider a variety of institutional configurations that go further than the more limited dummy indicators available in the literature.  We use this original dataset (1) to understand mechanisms of cross-national diffusion in the adoption of different frameworks of bank regulation and (2) to document changes in bank performance--as measured by banking crises propensities, aggregate net worth of banking systems, and profitability of the banking industry--following periods of tightened financial regulation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]