significant central bank reserves. Against this background, Uruguay now faces issues beyond those addressed to stabilize the … central bank reserves. …

This paper analyzes the relationship between oil price shocks and bank profitability. Using data on 145 banks in 11 oil …-exporting MENA countries for 1994-2008, we test hypotheses of direct and indirect effects of oil price shocks on bank profitability …. Our results indicate that oil price shocks have indirect effect on bank profitability, channeled through country …

, or is relatively inefficient, then imperfect competition and intermediate levels of bank risks are optimal. These results … technology exhibits increasing returns to scale, or it is relatively efficient, then perfect competition is optimal and supports … the lowest feasible level of bank risk. Conversely, if the intermediation technology exhibits constant returns to scale …

far-reaching banking sector reforms undertaken in Uganda to improve competition and efficiency. Using models that have … been previously used only in industrial countries, we find that the level of competition has increased significantly and …

As in other sectors, competition in finance matters for allocative, productive and dynamic efficiency. Theory suggests …, however, that unfettered competition is not first best given the special features of finance. I review these analytics and … describe how to assess the degree of competition in markets for financial services. Existing research shows that the degree of …

conclusions. First, further steps in regional integration would enhance competition and produce large economic benefits for both …

This paper provides an empirical assessment of the degree of competition in Hong Kong SAR using industry-level data … decade has also made it slightly less competitive on average. Imperfect competition is not leading to counter …

This paper presents empirical evidence on the impact of competition on firm productivity. Using firm-level observations … from the World Bank Enterprise Survey database, we find a positive and robust causal relationship between our proxies for … competition and our measures of productivity. We also find that countries that implemented product-market reforms had a more …

Traditional bank competition policy seeks to balance efficiency with incentives to take risk. The main tools are rules … argue that bank competition policy should be reoriented to deal with the too-big-to-fail (TBTF) problem. It should also … seek to affect the degree of competition by focusing on market structure (i.e. concentration) may have limited effect. We …