Introducing the Revised and Updated Financial Reform Database

Abstract

This article introduces a revised and updated version of the Financial Reform Database, which is widely used by economists and political economists. In this revision, country coverage is extended from 91 to 100 economies. Also, the time period covered is extended from 1973–2005 to 1973–2013. Furthermore, the coding rule relating to the enhancement of banking supervision is revised to enhance the clarity of the coding criteria used to measure the independence of a banking supervisory agency, taking into account the concepts of institutional independence and supervisory independence. In addition, in order to systematically compare policy changes across time and countries, seven dimensions of financial policies are further divided into 20 financial policy subdimensions, and each of these subdimensional policy scores is separately coded in this revision. This allows researchers to utilize each subdimension depending on their interests. The detailed policy description of each subdimensional policy reform for all countries and all years is made publicly available. In this article, an overview of the updated Financial Reform Database is provided.