This paper provides empirical evidence on life-cycle patterns in the asset allocation of Swedish households. Data on household portfolio allocation are collected from the HINK surveys for the period 1982-1992, and portfolio shares of different asset categories are regressed on age, period, and...

Based on survey data covering 6,547 firms in 10 Central and Eastern European countries we examine the impact of the banking sector environment, as well as the institutional and regulatory environment, on credit constrained firms. We find that small and foreign-owned firms are less likely to...

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 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...

Existing literature highlights opportunistic behavior as the main reason why rational agents underinvest in relationship-specific assets (the hold-up problem). However, a supplier would also be reluctant to undertake relationship-specific investment if she cannot observe financial stability or...