Until the eruption of the 2007-2008 international crisis, the decade was characterized by a high growth of credit –especially credit lines for consumption– and of GDP in a large part of the developed and developing worlds. By the end of the period, the process coincided with increasing...

Working on a sample of OECD countries spanning the period 1970-2003, this paper contributes to the literature on the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle by making three main innovations: First, it goes beyond the traditional national-level investment-saving equations to estimate, for the first time,...

The goal of this paper is to provide up-to-date worldwide evidence on the short-term relationship between credit changes and output changes. Standard correlation methods, state of-the-art panel Granger causality tests, and panel regressions were applied on a maximum sample of 144 countries over...

This paper analyzes the relationship between the quality of the commercial credit portfolio and diversification in the financial entities of Argentina during the period 1998-2006. To this effect, a database of the financial sector (banking and non-banking) is used, which allows to consider three...

This paper analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of corporate self-financing from de perspective of corporative finance in order to evaluate its macroeconomic consequences. Specifically, a corporate self-financing coefficient is calculated for a group of 15 countries of OECD during the...

This paper shows that a puzzling yet strong correlation exists between imports and exports. Cross-section and time-series analysis for the broadest possible country sample (159 countries over 1960-2006) attests to the robustness of this finding, even though causality is not explored in depth....

This paper addresses in detail, for first time, the use of collateral in the Argentine banking system by exploiting the informative richness of the borrowers database at the Central Bank (Central de Deudores del Banco Central), focusing on the loans to companies for which accounting information...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze, for the first time, the characteristics of non-performing loans in the Argentine banking system in the period 1999-2005, focusing on loans to companies. These are the main findings: (1) the percentage of non-performing loans is closely related to the...

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether the banking system, over and beyond its credit function, has a significant impact on per capita GDP by providing means of payment. An annual database of 85 countries spanning the 1980-2008 period is exploited to this end. On the descriptive front,...