This paper describes the recent trends in foreign bank ownership in developing countries, summarizes the existing evidence on the causes and implications of foreign bank presence, and reexamines the link between banking crises and foreign bank participation. Using data on the share of banking...

Deteriorating public finances around the world raise doubts about countries' abilities to bail out their largest banks. For an international sample of banks, this paper investigates the impact of government indebtedness and deficits on bank stock prices and credit default swap spreads. Overall,...

An apparent temporary narrowing of income inequality has been observed during several recent banking crises. But it would be a mistake to conclude that such crises don't matter for the poor. For one thing, the correlation is not strong, and the opposite pattern has also been present. Besides,...

The author tests the hypothesis that during systemic banking crises, access to finance is opportunistically tightened by incumbents to eliminate or weaken competition from mainly young firms. He finds this to be especially true in more corrupt countries. To do so, he uses a methodology similar...

A rapidly growing empirical literature is studying the causes and consequences of bank fragility in contemporary economies. The authors reviews the two basic methodologies adopted in cross-country empirical studies-the signals approach and the multivariate probability model-and their application...

This paper investigates the leading causes of nonperforming loans during the economic and banking crises that affected a large number of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s. Empirical analysis shows a dramatic increase in these loans and extremely high credit risk, with significant...

The authors review the series of events that led to the 2002 Uruguayan banking crisis, assess the current status of the Uruguayan banking sector, and analyze the policy responses undertaken by the Uruguayan authorities to counteract the crisis. The main conclusion from their analysis is that...

This paper investigates how government interventions into banking systems such as blanket guarantees, liquidity support, recapitalizations, and nationalizations affect banking competition. This debate is important because the pricing of banking products has implications for borrower and...

In the aftermath of a banking crisis, most attention is rightly focused on allocating losses, rebuilding properly managed institutions, and achieving debt recovery. But the authorities' decision to use budgetary funds to help restructure a large failed bank or banking system also has...

Whether and when does banking serve to stabilize the economy? The authors view the banking system as a filter through which foreign and domestic shocks feed through to the domestic economy. The filter can dampen or amplify the shocks through various credit market channels, including credit...