This paper builds a new dataset on bank ownership and bank performance covering approximately 50,000 observations for 119 countries over the 1995-2002 period. The paper then uses the dataset to reassess the relationship between bank ownership and bank performance, providing separated estimations...

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...

Our research as well as that by other authors has found scale economies at all sizes of banks and the largest scale economies at the largest banks - that is, larger banks are able to provide products at lower average cost than smaller banks. While the earlier literature found that scale...

By eliminating the influence of statistical noise, stochastic frontier techniques permit the estimation of the best-practice value of a firm´s investment opportunities and the magnitude of a firm´s systematic failure to achieve its best-practice market value - a gauge of the magnitude of...

The second Basel Capital Accord points to market discipline as a tool to reinforce capital standards and supervision in promoting bank safety and soundness. The Bank for International Settlements contends that market discipline imposes strong incentives on banks to operate in a safe and...

Capital regulation has become increasingly complex as the largest financial institutions arbitrage differences in requirements across financial products to increase expected return for any given amount of regulatory capital, as financial regulators amend regulations to reduce arbitrage...

I develop a new monetarist model to analyze why an economy can fall into a liquidity trap, and what the effects of unconventional monetary policy measures such as helicopter money and negative interest rates are under these circumstances. I find that liquidity traps can be caused by a decrease...