We study how foreign bank penetration affects financial sector development in poor countries. A theoretical model shows that when domestic banks are better than foreign banks at monitoring soft information customers, foreign bank entry may hurt these customers and worsen welfare. The model also predicts that credit to the private sector should be lower in countries with more foreign bank penetr...

We study the dynamics of market entry following mergers and acquisitions (M&As), and the behavior of recent entrants in supplying output that might be withdrawn by the consolidating firms. The data, drawn from the banking industry, suggest that M&As are associated with subsequent increases in the probability of entry. The estimates suggest that M&As explain more than 20% of entry in metropolita...

Increasing market discipline has emerged as a major policy issue for banking regulators. The most prominent proposals for increasing market discipline would require banks to issue subordinated debt to the public. This paper explores the fundamental rationale behind mandatory subordinated debt proposals and their advantages and disadvantages. Our analysis indicates that a subordinated debt requi...

There is a well-documented cross-country literature on the relationship between finance and growth. This paper contributes to this literature by analysing the relationships between financial intermediation and economic growth within the regions of one country, rather than different countries. The focus on regions is relevant since regional information is more homogeneous, the legal and institut...

Private banks often blame state guarantees to distort competition by giving public banks the advantage of lower funding costs. In this paper I show that if borrowers perceive the public bank as supporting economic development, private banks may be able to separate firms by self selection, enter the market, and obtain profits in equilibrium despite their cost disadvantage. The public bank’s comp...

Is market-based or bank-based financial system better for fostering technological innovation as an engine of growth? I present evidence that bank-based systems promote rapid technological progress in those industrial sectors that depend heavily on external finance for funding innovation by facilitating credit access to younger firms. On the other hand, I also find evidence of a general positive...

The Basel 2 Accord requires regulatory capital to cover stress tests, yet no coherent and objective framework for stress testing portfolios exists. We propose a new methodology for stress testing in the context of market risk models that can incorporate both volatility clustering and heavy tails. Empirical results compare the performance of eight risk models with four possible conditional and u...

Banks are growing ever larger compared to their national economies. We show that increases in relative bank size (measured as a bank’s liabilities divided by national GDP) are linked to banks displaying higher tail risk. This effect is not entirely due to risk channels that disproportionately expose relatively large banks to systematic tail risks, sovereign risks, or banking crises. Instead, we...

The objective of this paper is to analyse the network topology of the Italian segment of the European overnight money market through methods of statistical mechanics applied to complex networks. We investigate differences in the activities of banks of different sizes and the evolution of their connectivity structure over the maintenance period. The main purpose of the analysis is to establish t...

I test theories of the recent financial crisis by studying how banks’ pre-crisis investments connect to their CEOs’ beliefs. Using different proxies for beliefs, I find banks with larger housing investments and worse crisis performance had CEOs who were more optimistic ex ante. Banks with the most optimistic CEOs experienced 20 percentage points higher real estate loan growth, and 15 percentage...