After Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in September 2008, cross-border bank lending contracted sharply. To explain the severity and variation in this contraction, we analyse detailed data on cross-border syndicated lending by 75 banks to 59 countries. We find that banks that had to write...

This paper explores how bank characteristics and the institutional environment influence the composition of banks’ loan portfolios. Using a new data set based on the recent EBRD Banking Environment and Performance Survey (BEPS), which was conducted in 2005 for 220 banks in 20 transition...

A defining feature of the banking systems in many transition countries is the large-scale presence of subsidiaries of multinational banks. We use new panel data on the intra-group ownership structure and the balance sheets of 45 of the largest banking groups in the world to analyse what...

This paper reviews the literature on the benefits and risks of global banking, with a focus on emerging Europe. It argues that while the potential destabilising impact of global banks was well understood before the 2008-09 financial crisis, the sheer magnitude of this impact in the case of...

We investigate the impact of cross-border takeovers on the performance of target banks in Ukraine. We combine propensity score matching and a difference-in-difference methodology, checking for temporary unobservables. Acquirers mainly targeted large less-capitalised banks with average efficiency...

This paper reviews the origin and spread of the distressed debt problem in the transition region. We argue that while the crisis was triggered abroad, the current high level of distressed debt in various transition countries mainly reflects home-grown vulnerabilities. As in the West, the root...

Using a novel way to identify relationship and transaction banks, we study how banks’ lending techniques affect funding to SMEs over the business cycle. For 21 countries we link the lending techniques that banks use in the direct vicinity of firms to these firms’ credit constraints at two...

We use data on the 48 largest multinational banking groups to compare the lending of their 199 foreign subsidiaries during the Great Recession with lending by a benchmark group of 202 domestic banks. Contrary to earlier, more contained, crises, parent banks were not a significant source of...

We use data on 1,294 banks in emerging Europe to analyse how bank ownership and the Vienna Initiative affected credit growth during the 2008-09 crisis. As part of the Vienna Initiative western European banks signed country-specific commitment letters in which they pledged to maintain exposures...

In this paper, we exploit variation in consumer price inflation across 71 Russian regions to examine the relationship between the perceived stability of the local currency and financial dollarisation. Our results show that regions with higher inflation experience an increase in the dollarisation...