Previous research has established (i) that a country’s financial sector influence future economic growth and (ii) that stock market index returns affect future economic growth. We extend and tie together these two strands of the growth literature by analyzing the relationship between banking...

The admission by the Greek government on October 18, 2009, of large-scale accounting fraud in its national accounts sparked an unprecedented sovereign debt crisis that rapidly spread to the Eurozone’s weakest member states. As the crisis increasingly drove a wedge between a seemingly resilient...

This paper investigates the growth effects of financial integration and financial deepening in selected SSA economies, using a panel dataset of 10 SSA countries from 1970-2012. We use ratio of net FDI inflow to GDP (proxy for financial integration), ratio of gross capital formation to GDP (proxy...

The financial system has always been subject to complex public scrutiny for a number of reasons, aimed at ensuring, for example, the efficient mobilization of savings, the effective management of banking crises and their possible domino effects, while enhancing competition and safeguarding...

Factors such as the spread of complex financial instruments, the broadening of available alternatives, have fostered more decisive public intervention in support of transparency between banks and their customers. The effectiveness of the public intervention measures depends on the actual...

Contingent charges for financial services, such as fees for unauthorized overdrafts, are often controversial. We study the economics of contingent charges in a stylized setting with naive and sophisticated consumers. We contrast situations where the naive benefit from the presence of...

The financial crisis has revealed fatal institutional and structural deficits at the finance market. Politics has reacted to the financial crisis with a sea of legal bills and regulations. But all regulating efforts are merely system-imminent reparation measures and do not solve the core...

The global financial meltdown brought to light a number of weaknesses in the U.S. financial system. Not all financial institution types will be taking large sums of taxpayer money to address their crippling decisions. Credit unions in the U.S. represent a type of financial cooperative that will...

Credit Unions have a number of advantages to offer customers relative to many banks and one of the reasons may be due to the way that their employees work. This paper will investigate whether employees at credit unions are more productive than bank employees. Theoretical arguments as to why this...

The introduction of institutions of credit information sharing - private credit bureaus and public credit registries - in the market for bank loans represent one of the possible solutions of information asymmetry problem, - the problem which the creditors tend to face. However the possibility of...