This paper studies whether and how banks' technological innovations affect the bank lending channel of monetary policy transmission. We first provide a theoretical model in which banks' technological innovation relaxes firms' earning-based borrowing constraints and thereby enlarges the response...

The paper analyzes the experiences and developments of Hungarian banking sector during the transitional process from a centralized economy to a market-oriented system.The paper identifies that early reorganization initiatives, flexible approaches to privatization, and liberal policies towards...

Using data from 1996 to 2000, we investigate the effects of ownership, especially by a strategic foreign owner, on bank efficiency for eleven transition countries in an unbalanced panel consisting of 225 banks and 856 observations.Applying stochastic frontier estimation procedures, we compute...

To investigate the impact of bank privatization in transition countries, we take the largest banks in six relatively advanced countries, namely, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Romania.Income and balance sheet characteristics are compared across four bank ownership...

There have been profound changes in both political and economic institutions in China over the last twenty years.Moreover, the pace of transition has led to variation across the country in the level of development.In this paper, we use panel data for the Chinese provinces to study the role of...

Modern banking institutions were virtually non-existent in the planned economies of cen-tral Europe and the former Soviet Union. In the early transition period, banking sectors began to develop during several years of macroeconomic decline and turbulence accompa-nied by repeated bank crises....

The pace of transition in China over the last two decades has led to great variation across the country in terms of institutional and financial development. In this paper, using a panel of Chinese provinces during the period 1993-2006, we empirically investigate the determinants of the...

This paper investigates the effects of focus versus diversification on bank performance using data on Chinese banks during the 1996-2006 period. We construct a new measure, economies of diversi-fication, and compare the results to those of the more conventional focus indices, which are based on...

Conventional wisdom in banking argues that diversification tends to reduce bank risk and improve performance, but the recent financial crisis suggests that aggressive diversification strategies may have resulted in increased risk taking and poor performance. This paper addresses this important...

China employs a unique foreign bank entry model. Instead of allowing full foreign control of domestic banks, foreign investors are only permitted to be involved in the local banks as minority shareholders. At the same time, foreign strategic investors are expected to commit to bank corporate...