Using a new, comprehensive database on bank ownership, identifying also the home country of foreign banks, for 137 countries over the period 1995-2009, this paper provides an overview of foreign bank activity and its impact of financial development and stability. We document substantial...

Relocation is a way of reducing costs, thus increasing competitiveness, by splitting production and services between countries. The main argument kindling the relocation debate suggests that moving abroad generates job losses in the home country, while production and job gains appear only in the...

This paper develops and tests a theoretical model that allows for the endogenous decision of banks to engage in international and global banking. International banking, where banks raise capital in the home market and lend it abroad, is driven by differences in factor endowments across...

The paper aims to verify the existence of the Flying Geese Model (FGM) in the case of inward FDI in Central European Countries (CECs) which are new EU member states; more precisely, to find out in what way and to what extent FDI has contributed to catching up, i.e. to the restructuring process...

Romania has experienced a drawn-out transformation process and received relatively low amounts of foreign direct investment (FDI). But it has become competitive in labour-intensive manufacturing industries through the integration into European company networks by processing trade. The country...

Since the late 1990s investors have been faced with new challenges due to changing locational characteristics in the Central European transition countries. Export demand became the main driving force of manufacturing FDI as opposed to local-market penetration in earlier years. In addition,...

This paper applies a gravity model to foreign direct investment (FDI) stocks in five countries of Southeast Europe from nine selected Western European source countries, using five countries of Central Europe as a control group. Basic elements of the economic theory on FDI are shortly reviewed,...

This paper provides a critical assessment of the costs and benefits of foreign bank ownership. It reviews the extensive literature on the impact of foreign banks and uses a unique database on bank ownership, covering 129 countries, to (re-)examine a number of the issues discussed. It documents...

The periodically returning debates and the disappointing bargaining on the financial perspectives for 2007-2013 have led to the proposal of a comprehensive review of the EU budget in 2008/2009. This provides an opportunity for initiating fundamental reforms of the revenue side of the EU budget....

Evidence on productivity spillovers from FDI to domestic firms is ambiguous. Incorrect estimation procedures may be one of the sources for the contradictory results obtained in empirical studies on this subject. We observe that inadequacy of the estimation procedures leads to a severe...