This paper analyses the determinants of banks’ loan loss allowances for samples of US banks and three non-US samples: a group of 21 countries, Canada and Japan. The model includes fundamental (or non-discretionary) determinants of the allowance such as non-performing loans, and discretionary...

Foreign direct investment (FDI) flows into developing countries have been increasing dramatically over the past decade. At the same time, there has been widespread concern that lax environmental standards are in part responsible for this surge. This paper revisits the pollution haven hypothesis...

Recent empirical studies of the determinants of multinational activity across countries have found overwhelming support for a horizontal rather than a vertical model of foreign direct investment (FDI). They all use U.S. or other developed country data. This paper, in contrast, uses a previously...

The purpose of this article is to assess how the changing operations of international banks in emerging countries in the last decades have altered the risks they face as well as their mitigation techniques. The recent expansion of the international banking business through the setup of branches...

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...

The environmental impact of Foreign Direct Investment is still to be explored totally. It is often argued that investment may come to a region or country where environment protection norms are less strict. Investors may be induced to outsource their pollution-intensive production where the...

The environmental impact of Foreign Direct Investment is still to be explored totally. It is often argued that investment may come to a region or country where environment protection norms are less strict. Investors may be induced to outsource their pollution-intensive production where the...

What macroeconomic and financial variables play key roles in the foreign direct investment decision (FDI) of firms? This question is addressed in this paper using a large panel data set of cross-border Merger & Acquisition (M&A) deals for the period 1990-1999. Various econometric specifications...

On the basis of focused interviews with managers of foreign parent banks and their affiliates in Central Europe and the Baltics, we analyse foreign banks’ small business lending and internal capital markets. This allows us to complement the standard empirical literature, which has difficulty...

This paper investigates the relationship between bilateral FDI positions and cross-country business cycle correlations in the period 1982–2001. We find that countries that have comparatively intensive FDI relations also have more synchronized business cycles during 1995–2001. Before 1995, we...