The Nigerian banking system was in crisis for much of the 1990's and early 2000's. The reforms of 2005 were ambitious in simultaneously attempting to address safety, soundness, and accessibility. This paper uses published and new survey data through 2008 to investigate whether bank consolidation...

With extensive country- and firm-level data sets we first document that the financial sectors of most sub-Saharan African countries remain significantly underdeveloped by the standards of other developing countries. We also find that population density appears to be considerably more important...

This essay examines how the Banking Acts of the 1933 and 1935 and related New Deal legislation influenced risk taking in the financial sector of the U.S. economy. The analysis focuses on contingent liability of bank owners for losses incurred by their firms and how the elimination of this...

As a result of debt enforcement problems, many high-productivity firms in emerging economies are unable to pledge enough future profits to their creditors and this constrains the financing they can raise. Many have argued that, by relaxing these credit constraints, reforms that strengthen...

Banking reforms--that reduced interest rates--boosted college enrollment rates among able students from middle class families. We define "able" students as those with learning aptitude scores in the top two-thirds of the U.S. population. We define "middle class" as families in which both parents...

Using comprehensive loan-level data in China, we investigate how the deregulation on bank entry barriers alters local banking industrial organisation and its economic consequences. We document a novel trade-off: the potential benefits of deregulation are adversely mitigated by entrant banks’...

Financial intermediaries borrow in order to lend. When credit is increasing rapidly, the traditional deposit funding (core liabilities) is supplemented with other funding (non-core liabilities). We explore the hypothesis that monetary aggregates reflect the size of non-core and core liabilities...

This paper investigates the quantitative implications of two business cycle models in which aggregate fluctuations arise in response to variations in the process of financial intermediation. In the first, fundamental shocks in the capital accumulation process lead to fluctuations in the real...

The 2008-2009 financial crises, while originating in the United States, witnessed a drop in asset prices and output that was at least as large in the rest of the world as in the United States. A widely held view is that this was the result of global transmission through leveraged financial...

We present a model of shadow banking in which financial intermediaries originate and trade loans, assemble these loans into diversified portfolios, and then finance these portfolios externally with riskless debt. In this model: i) outside investor wealth drives the demand for riskless debt and...