Consistent with recent theoretical models, this paper finds that financial openness has a positive effect on private credit in economies characterized by a competitive banking sector, but that this effect vanishes and even becomes negative in economies with imperfect banking competition.

This paper proposes an extension of the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition from two to a continuum of comparison groups. The proposed decomposition is then estimated for racial wage differences in urban Peru, exploiting a novel data set that allows the capturing of different degrees of mestizaje...