"A large literature examines the link between shocks to households and the educational attainment of children. The authors use new data to estimate the impact of shocks to teachers on student learning in mathematics and English. Using absenteeism in the 30 days preceding the survey as a measure...

" The objective of this paper is to analyze the industry structure of banking services in Brazil in order to shed light on financial performance and its drivers at a disaggregated level. The study illustrates how differences across market segments - which tend to be averaged out in aggregate...

"The intensity of recent turbulence in financial markets has surprised nearly everyone. This paper searches out the root causes of the crisis, distinguishing them from scapegoating explanations that have been used in policy circles to divert attention from the underlying breakdown of incentives....

"Under the traditional "competition-fragility" view, more bank competition erodes market power, decreases profit margins, and results in reduced franchise value that encourages bank risk taking. Under the alternative "competition-stability" view, more market power in the loan market may result...

"The authors formulate and test hypotheses about the role of bank ownership types-foreign, state-owned, and private domestic banks-in banking relationships, using data from India. The empirical results are consistent with all of their hypotheses with regard to foreign banks. These banks tend to...

"Over the past decade, the Brazilian banking industry has undergone major and deep transformations with several privatizations of state-owned banks, mergers and acquisitions, closing down of troubled banks, entry by foreign banks, and so on. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impacts...

"An apparent temporary narrowing of income inequality has been observed during several recent banking crises. But it would be a mistake to conclude that such crises don't matter for the poor. For one thing, the correlation is not strong, and the opposite pattern has also been present. Besides,...

"The authors jointly analyze the static, selection, and dynamic effects of domestic, foreign, and state ownership on bank performance. They argue that it is important to include indicators of all the relevant governance effects in the same model. "Nonrobustness" checks (which purposely exclude...