This paper studies the cyclical pattern of ex post markups in the banking system using balance-sheet data for a large set of countries. Markups are strongly countercyclical even after controlling for financial development, banking concentration, operational costs, inflation, and simultaneity or...

This paper provides the first comparative analysis of different types of publicly owned banks operating in China between 1997 and 2008. Using principal component analysis and Granger-causality tests, this study shows that China's state-owned commercial banks and rural credit cooperatives did not...

The literature on aid effectiveness has focused more on recipient policies than the determinants of aid allocation yet a consistent result is that political allies obtain more aid from donors than non-allies. This paper shows that aid allocated to political allies is ineffective for growth,...

How important is financial development for economic development? A costly state verification modelof financial intermediation is presented to address this question. The model is calibrated to match factsabout the U.S. economy, such as intermediation spreads and the firm-size distribution for the...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of state-owned banks and also presents some new results and a robustness analysis. The paper shows that state-owned banks located in developing countries have fiscal costs because they are characterized by lower returns than...

We classify a large sample of banks according to the geographic diversification of their international syndicated loan portfolio. Our results show that diversified banks maintain higher loan supply during banking crises in borrower countries. The positive loan supply effects lead to higher...

This paper lays out some of the basic concepts surrounding financial inclusion, including access to banking, digital payments and financial literacy, as well as markets for health insurance, crop insurance, agricultural credit, small firm finance, and microcredit/ microfinance. It goes on to...

We investigate the effect of financial integration on the degree of international business cycle synchronization. For identfication, we use a confidential database on banks' bilateral exposure over the past three decades and employ a novel bilateral country-pair panel instrumental vari- ables...

Capital inflows have an enormous importance in the financing of investment in emerging and transition economies. However short-term inflows, intermediated by the banking sector of the emerging economy, may be subject to early withdrawals. We model a situation where such withdrawals are motivated...

In this paper we discuss the potential for commercial microfinance in China. Particular emphasis is put on securitization of microloans and on structured microfinance in a China context. Three particular factors that we believe could support a strong growth in Chinese structured microfinance are...