Distance, as a proxy for trade barriers, is found in many studies to matter even for weightless cross-border financial investments and lending, possibly due to the presence of information asymmetries. Its importance is tested in this paper using exports of all five broad categories of the...

This paper examines innovation, deregulation, and firm dynamics over the life cycle of the U.S. ATM and debit card industry. In doing so, we construct a dynamic equilibrium model to study how a major product innovation (introducing the new debit card function) interacted with banking...

Financial technology (Fintech) has prompted authorities to consider their potential financial stability benefits, risks, and effective regulation. Recent developments suggest that regulatory approaches and their legal foundations need to augment entity-based regulation with increasing focus on...

This paper examines the impact of the new financial services law in Bolivia-including credit quotas and interest rate caps-on financial stability and inclusion. So far, credit to 'targeted' sectors is growing as intended by the law but the increase in the average loan size of microfinance...

The recent media and political attention on service outsourcing from developed to developing countries gives the impression that outsourcing is exploding. As a result, workers in industrial countries are anxious about job losses. This paper aims to establish what are the hypes and what are the...

This paper examines the relationship between financial regulation and the current account in an intertemporal model of the current account where financial regulation affects the current account through liquidity constraints. Greater liquidity constraints decrease the size and persistence of the...

We propose a toolkit for the assessment of systemic risk buildup in low income countries. We show that, due to non-linearity in the relationship between credit and financial stability, the assessment should be conducted with different tools at different stages of financial development. In...