This paper investigates the relationship between bank competition and credit procyclicality for 17 OECD countries on the 1986-2009 period. We account for heterogeneity among countries in terms of bank competition through the use of a hierarchical clustering methodology. We then estimate panel...

Strong credit growth rates in transition countries may result from a normal catching-up process in a framework of financial development. However, as elsewhere, they can also pertain to a “credit boom”, paving the way to future “credit crunches”. We try to disentangle these two types of...

We employ a unique dataset to study the impact of foreign bank ownership and mode of entry on banks’ lending rates to transparent and opaque borrowers. We find that greenfield banks charge lower lending rates on average and we test for two hypotheses that can explain the lower cost of credit...

This study investigates the impact of foreign bank penetration in Central and Eastern Europe on firm entry. We demonstrate that the acquisition of domestic banks by foreign investors has led to reduced firm creation, smaller average size of entrants and increased firm exit in opaque industries...

In a fixed exchange-rate regime, monetary policy is not devoted to internal equilibrium, such that the Taylor principle is no more the condition to insure the determinacy of the dynamic. Monetary policy is in charge of stabilizing the fixed-exchange rate regime in the long run, i.e. to avoid an...