Using a new, comprehensive database on bank ownership, identifying also the home country of foreign banks, for 137 countries over the period 1995-2009, this paper provides an overview of foreign bank activity and its impact of financial development and stability. We document substantial...

This paper develops and tests a theoretical model that allows for the endogenous decision of banks to engage in international and global banking. International banking, where banks raise capital in the home market and lend it abroad, is driven by differences in factor endowments across...

This paper provides a critical assessment of the costs and benefits of foreign bank ownership. It reviews the extensive literature on the impact of foreign banks and uses a unique database on bank ownership, covering 129 countries, to (re-)examine a number of the issues discussed. It documents...

There are numerous ways to indicate the degree of banking competition across countries. Antitrust authorities rely on the structure-conduct-performance paradigm while academics prefer price mark-ups (Lerner index) or correlations of input costs with output prices (H-statistic). These measures...

Cross-country regressions suggest that urbanization and FDI are important drivers of growth However, it is not clear that primacy eventually hurts growth performance. Since it is tough to interpret cross-country growth regressions, we provide detailed evidence on the determinants of outward FDI...

Although cross-border bank lending has fallen sharply since the crisis, extending our bank ownership database from 1995-2009 up to 2013 shows only limited retrenchment in foreign bank presence. While banks from OECD countries reduced their foreign presence (but still represent 89% of foreign...

We use focused interviews with bank managers to analyse how multinational banks use internal capital markets to control their subsidiaries. It is found that foreign bank affiliates are strongly influenced by the capital allocation and credit steering mechanisms of the parent bank. Parent banks...

In this paper, we question whether there is a catch-up effect or announcement effect in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from the European Union (EU) to the ten EU accession countries. We study FDI outflows from the Netherlands, a small open economy with few historical ties to Eastern Europe, and...

Population aging and pension reform will have profound effects on international capital markets. First, demographic change alters the time path of aggregate savings within each country. Second, this process may be amplified when a pension reform shifts old-age provision towards more pre-funding....

We investigate to what extent the expansion of FDI and the internationalization of production can be related to the recent phenomenon of more synchronized business cycles. We first focus on the relationship between bilateral FDI positions and cross-country output correlations in the period 1982-...