impact on banking outreach using newly gathered data for Mexico, where foreign bank participation rose from 2 percent to 83 …

Theory makes ambiguous predictions about the relationship between market structure and competitiveness of the banking … system and banking sector stability. Empirical studies focusing on individual countries provide similarly ambiguous results …, while cross-country studies point mostly to a positive relationship between competition and stability in the banking system …

Using a unique bank-level data set on the Ugandan banking system during 1999-2005, the authors explore the factors …, and banking efficiency. Similarly, macroeconomic variables can explain little of the over-time variation in bank spreads …

The authors (1) present new indicators of banking sector penetration across 99 countries based on a survey of bank … regulatory authorities, (2) show that these indicators predict household and firm use of banking services, (3) explore the … countries, and (4) relate these banking outreach indicators to measures of firms' financing constraints. In particular, they …