Theory suggests that the effect of banking market concentration on financial stability is mediated by several competing variables. Using a sample of 68 countries from 1997 to 2015, this paper proposes a unified empirical framework to test for the simultaneous presence and impact of the mediators...

This paper revisits trends in bank privatization and analyzes their economic impact over the past 25 years. Building on a novel data set of privatization events for 70 developed and developing countries, it shows that bank privatization became more frequent since the Global Financial Crisis,...

This paper attempts to study the impact of Brazilian Development Bank credit on resource misallocation in Brazil, using manufacturing firm-level data from 2003-14. The paper first estimates measures of resource misallocation based on Hsieh and Klenow (2009), documenting high variation in firms'...

The costs of financial intermediation have important consequences for financial development. Using bank-level data for 160 countries during 2005-14, this paper analyzes the composition and sources of bank net interest margins. First, it uses an accounting decomposition framework to provide...

Financial repression resurfaced in the wake of the global financial crisis and might become a common feature in the post Covid-19 world. To advance knowledge and inform policy advice, this paper presents a new database on interest rate controls, a popular form of financial repression, based on a...