Four-fifths of the adult population do not have access to formal financial services in Nigeria. This paper examines the characteristics of 'unbanked' households in Nigeria, investigates the extent and determinants of supply and demand side barriers, and explores the specific role played by...

Is the mobile banking revolution overcoming the tyranny of distance to bank infrastructure and improving financial inclusion in sub-Saharan Africa? Focusing on Kenya, this paper uses Global Positioning System (GPS) data to investigate the importance of distance and time to bank branch for...

Economic theory and recent empirical evidence suggest that access to savings, payment and credit services can play a key role in poverty alleviation. Despite this, significant financial exclusion persists across sub-Saharan Africa. By pooling eleven nationally representative surveys, this paper...

Prior research suggests an inverse relationship between geographic distance and financial market linkages. In this paper, we examine whether and how cultural distance between countries mitigates this finding. We find that country-pairs exhibit higher linkages if they have smaller cultural...

We test for shift contagion between pairs of East Asian equity markets over a sample including the financial crisis of the 1990’s. Employing the methodology of Gravelle et al. (2006), we find little evidence of change in the mechanism by which common shocks are transmitted between countries....

We examine the extent to which markets enable the provision of housing finance across a wide range of countries. Housing is a major purchase requiring a long-term financing, and the factors that are associated with well functioning housing finance systems are those that enable the provision of...

The objective of this paper is to test for predictability in the Middle-Eastern North African (MENA) markets by investigating both the weak-form efficiency hypothesis (WFEMH) and the presence of abnormal returns. Starting with tests for the random-walk hypothesis, we use daily data returns and a...

We examine the issue of possible portfolio diversification benefits into seven Middle-Eastern and North African (MENA) stock markets. We construct international portfolios in dollars and local currencies. We compute the ex-ante weights by plugging five optimization models and two risk measures...