This paper examines competition among commercial banks following deregulation in a small open economy. I jointly estimate a system of differentiated product demand and pricing equations, and use conduct parameters to identify market structure. The empirical results show that the banking sector...

Data on corporate governance and disclosure practices reveal wide within-country variation that decreases with the strength of investors' legal protection. A simple model identifies three firm attributes related to that variation: investment opportunities, external financing, and ownership...

Since the 1997-8 Asian financial crisis, the level of foreign bank penetration has increased steadily in Asian banking markets. This paper examines the impact of foreign banks on the monetary policy transmission mechanism in emerging Asian economies during the period from 2000 to 2009, with a...

This paper sheds light on the transmission mechanism of loan-to-value (LTV) policy to financial stability by providing three findings from Hong Kong. First, there is evidence that LTV cap tightening since 2009 has dampened both borrowers' leverage and credit growth, and that lower leverage has...

"New Tigers" (including city commercial banks) outperform state-owned commercial banks burdened with non-performing loans from unprofitable state-owned enterprises. We study whether this is due solely to superior corporate governance (multiple shareholders versus total government ownership) or...

This report identifies a set of policy lessons for China today drawn from the experience of financial deregulation, financial crisis and recovery in Scandinavia during the period 1985-2000. Although there are considerable differences between the huge Chinese economy and the small Nordic...

This study examines the productivity growth of the nationwide banks of China and a sample of city commercial, banks for the eleven years to 2007. Estimates of total factor productivity growth are constructed with appropriate confidence intervals, using a bootstrap method for the Malmquist index....

Per unit bank operating costs are found to vary significantly across Asian countries and over time. The strong correlation between per unit labor cost and physical capital cost suggests that there exist systematic differences in bank operating efficiency across countries. The declining operating...

This paper shows that pyramidal ownership can be used to control downside risk. The research setting is Thailand before and after the 1997 Asian crisis. The focus is on family business groups that owned banks. The results show that the controlling family pursues different investment strategies...

The present paper examines stochastic cost functions of Malaysian commercial banks from 1991 to 1997 periods and catches the changes in their management structure and technical efficiency. Then, we also discuss policy implications for bank integration and competition policy which is the part of...