Microfinance institutions are important, particularly in developing countries, because they expand the frontier of financial intermediation by providing loans to those traditionally excluded from formal financial markets. This paper presents the first systematic statistical examination of the...

This paper first describes the major concerns associated with SWFs, mainly revolving around state ownership and lack of transparency. It then focuses on the National Fund for the Future of Kazakhstan (the “oil fund”, or NOF) and Samruk Kazyna (SK), the holding company for state owned...

CEECs are characterised by a significant presence of foreign banks and by a marked dependence upon financing from foreign bankers. We show that this situation leaves these countries open to two types of financial risk, which have grown throughout the present decade. The first relates to the...

We study bank discrimination against private firms in transition countries. Theoretically, we show that banks may discriminate for non-profit reasons, but this discrimination diminishes with a bank’s incentives and human capital. Employing matching bank-firm data from China, we empirically...

The paper seeks to assess how a major policy regime change – such as the introduction of the currency board in Bulgaria – affects the flow of bank credit to the corporate sector. An attempt is made to identify the determinants of corporate credit separately from the viewpoint of lenders and...

Credit to the private sector has risen rapidly in European emerging markets but its risk evaluation has been largely neglected. Using retail-loan banking data from the Czech Republic we construct two credit risk models based on logistic regression and Classification and Regression Trees. Both...

Limited access of entrepreneurs to credit constrains the creation and growth of private firms. In Africa, access to credit is particularly limited for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) due to unclear property rights and the lack of assets that can be used as collateral. This paper presents a...

CEECs are characterised by a significant presence of foreign banks and by a marked dependence upon financing from foreign bankers. We show that this situation leaves these countries open to two types of financial risk, which have grown throughout the present decade. The first relates to the...

This paper analyzes the evolution in bank performance following the removal of legal restrictions on the entry of foreign banks in three transition economies: the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. Two modes of foreign bank entry are considered: entry by Greenfield investments, and by foreign...

This paper investigates the impact of specific modes of entry of foreign banks, i.e. greenfield investment versus merger and acquisition, on bank performance in three transition economies – the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. We use stochastic frontier analysis to model and measure the...