With this paper we seek to contribute to the literature on the relation between finance and growth. We argue that most studies in the field fail to measure the quality of financial intermediation but rather resort to using proxies on the size of financial systems. Moreover, cross-country...

We test whether output growth in European economic agglomeration regions depends on financial development. To this end we suggest a relative measure of the quality of financial institutions rather than the usual quantity proxy of financial development. In order to measure the quality of...

Developments in risk-transfer instruments and risk management techniques in the last two decades have fundamentally changed how banks manage their assets and liabilities. In this document we show that, for all three sectors of German universal banks (private commercial banks, savings banks, and...

This paper provides evidence that interbank markets are tiered rather than flat, in the sense that most banks do not lend to each other directly but through money center banks acting as intermediaries. We capture the concept of tiering by developing a core-periphery model, and devise a procedure...