Promoting the seed regeneration potential of secondary forests undergoing gap disturbances is an important approach for achieving forest restoration and sustainable management. Seedling recruitment from seed banks strongly determines the seed regeneration potential, but the process is poorly understood in the gaps of secondary forests. The objectives of the present study were to evaluate the ef...

The Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing” (QE) policy ended in the fall of 2014, even though economic growth in the US was still sluggish, wage growth was stagnant and inflation was still far below the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%. In this paper we seek some clues to help explain the Fed’s decision by studying the political economy of the QE policy. In particular, we study which business se...

This paper investigates whether competition in the Japanese banking sector has improved in the last quarter of the 20 century. By estimating the first order condition of profit maximization, together with the cost function and the inverse demand function, we found that competition had improved, especially in the 1970s and in the first half of the 1980s. The results fail to reject a Cournot olig...

Empirical estimates of the benefit of financial intermediation are constructed by examining the role played by local banks in facilitating syndicated loans to borrowers in emerging market countries. Assuming that local banks possess a superior monitoring ability, the market is ideal for studying the value of intermediation since cross-border lending into emerging markets is plagued by particula...

Banking industry is exposed to different type of risks like credit, operational, interest rate risk, liquidity risk, foreign currency risk, compliance risk, reputational risk, and country risk. Banking industry can only become stable and stronger if they have proper tools to mitigate these risks. Due to product innovation and complexity of operations banks are giving more importance to mitigate...

I investigate how the complicated model-based capital regulation can be misused by European banks for capital saving purposes. I find that relative to banks from core countries, banks from peripheral countries (1) can greatly reduce the risk-weight associated with their assets by applying more internal rating-based (IRB) approach, and (2) the default frequency of their assets is not reflected i...

Finding ways to downscale microfinance is one of the current challenges facing commercial banks, especially in developing countries. As banks have a poor knowledge of microfinance, operating in this market will require capacity-building, innovative business models and new technological architectures. This paper discusses how one particular architecture – the Brazilian model of correspondent ban...

I provide a definition of the Banks set, or set of sophisticated voting outcomes, over an infinite policy space and when individual preferences are weak. I also show that the Banks set is a subset of one definition of the uncovered set, but not another. The interpretation of the Banks set in this setting differs from Banks’s original interpretation in the implicit role of the agenda setter. In ...

Despite recent innovations that might have reduced banks’ reliance on brick-and-mortar branches for distributing retail financial services, the number of U.S. bank branches has continued to increase steadily over time. Further, an increasing percentage of these branches are held by banks with large branch networks. This paper assesses the implications of these developments by examining a series...