Should banks be diversified or focused? Does diversification indeed lead to enhanced performance and, therefore, greater safety for banks, as traditional portfolio and banking theory would suggest? This paper investigates the link between banks' profitability (ROA) and their portfolio...

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...

In this paper we study whether inflation expectations react on variations of election outcome expectations. Using data from 6 countries we show that such a link in fact exists and thus provides empirical evidence supportive to rational partisan theory of business cycles.