The entry of multinational banks (MNBs) into the developing and transition economies is expected to create more market discipline for domestic banks, thus making them more efficient and enhancing financial stability. But is this the case? Using data from the Bank for International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund, I first try to determine which factors tend to increase MNB lendin...

A key element of the G20 response to the global financial crisis has been to develop policies to address the ‘too-big-to-fail’ problem posed by systemically important financial institutions (SiFis). the first step is to identify such entities. to that end, there has been extensive work undertaken in recent years, especially at the global level in view of the cross-country impact of large intern...

This paper uses variation in policies and institutional characteristics to evaluate the impacts of village-level microfinance institutions in rural Thailand. To identify impacts, we use policies related to the successful/unsuccessful provision of services as exogenous variation in effective financial intermediation. We find that institutions, particularly those with good policies, can promote a...

China has been enjoyed a fast economic growth in the last three decades. One of the important reasons is its financial reform and development in banking sector. More and more foreign banks and nonstate-owned banks participate into the competition in banking industry. The productivity of banking sector keeps growing dramatically during the golden decade between the 1997 Asian financial crisis an...

Mobile banking is a newly added service in the banking sector that facilitates banking via mobile devices. With the tremendous growth in mobile phone usage, banks in the developed world have moved to utilize mobile banking, which makes banking easier, faster, and very cost-effective. Mobile phones have quickly emerged as a successful and popular means of communication in recent years and the re...

In this paper, we show the importance of accounting for heterogeneity among sample firms in stochastic frontier analysis. For a fairly homogenous sample of German savings and cooperative banks, we analyze how alternative theoretical assumptions regarding the nature of heterogeneity can be modeled and the extent to which the respective empirical specifications affect estimated efficiency levels ...

Since the period of bank deregulation in the 1980s, deferred deposit loan operations, better known as payday lenders, have become commonplace in the landscapes of many American cities. At the same time, traditional banking facilities have become less common, especially in the inner city. Growing disparities in the type of and accessibility to credit in the inner city has generated calls for gre...

The Internet has affected and partially radically changed the business models of traditional industries. Crowdfunding as a new concept of funding over the Internet by a large crowd has especially gained maturity. Crowdfunding offerings range from funding charitable projects or innovative gadgets to a funding alternative for start-ups or small businesses. Therefore, crowdfunding represents an in...

This paper uses variation in policies and institutional characteristics to evaluate the impacts of village-level microfinance institutions in rural Thailand. To identify impacts, we use policies related to the successful/unsuccessful provision of services as exogenous variation in effective financial intermediation. We find that institutions, particularly those with good policies, can promote a...

This paper provides a review of empirical research on the link between financial intermediation by banks and economic growth. Special attention is paid to the issues of causality, non-linearity, time perspective, financial intermediation proxies, and interaction terms. The review shows that there are still quite a few unresolved issues in empirical research, which causes scepticism towards prio...