Drawing from a unique data set comprising 2,893 banks and 152 countries over the period 1987 to 2000, we test whether the adoption of the Basel Accord by Latin American and Caribbean countries was responsible for the serious slowdowns in credit growth experienced by these countries. We find...

This paper provides an overview of the reserve requirement measures undertaken by the Central Bank of Peru. It provides a rationale for the use of these instruments as well as empirical evidence of their effectiveness by means of a novel counterfactual policy evaluation method. In general, the...

What is the impact of foreign bank entry on the pricing and availability of credit in developing economies? The Mexican banking system provides a quasi-experiment to address this question because in 1997 the Mexican government radically changed the laws governing the foreign ownership of banks:...

"This paper, by Meral Karasulu, measures the degree of competition in the Chilean banking sector. This question has traditionally been addressed by measuring the degree of concentration in the sector. However, the relationship between concentration and competition is thin with regard to the...

Argentina's economic crisis has strong similarities with previous crises stretching back to the nineteenth century. A common thread runs through all these crises: the interaction of a weak, undisciplined, or corruptible banking sector, and some other group of conspirators from the public or...

We revisit the public banks debate, survey the theoretical arguments and test the robustness (and expand) the existing empirical evidence. While we find some support for the view that public banks do not allocate credit optimally, we also report indicative evidence that they exert a positive...

The controversial proposal to overhaul the international accord regarding the regulation of bank capital was completed in 2004, and the thirteen Basel Committee member countries are set to implement the new accord, known as Basel II, by 2007. We develop a Basel II decision tree to guide...

The rise and fall of Argentina´s currency board illustrates the extent to which the advantages of hard pegs have been overstated. The currency board did provide nominal stability and boosted financial intermediation, at the cost of endogenous financial dollarization, but did not foster fiscal...