Recent developments and theoretical work on the transition economies has emphasised the importance of internal bargaining and incentives. This paper constitutes the first attempt to systematise the large and growing body of case studies of enterprise restructuring in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia,...

Using a novel way to identify relationship and transaction banks, we study how banks’ lending techniques affect funding to SMEs over the business cycle. For 21 countries we link the lending techniques that banks use in the direct vicinity of firms to these firms’ credit constraints at two...

This paper reviews the literature on the benefits and risks of global banking, with a focus on emerging Europe. It argues that while the potential destabilising impact of global banks was well understood before the 2008-09 financial crisis, the sheer magnitude of this impact in the case of...

In this paper, we exploit variation in consumer price inflation across 71 Russian regions to examine the relationship between the perceived stability of the local currency and financial dollarisation. Our results show that regions with higher inflation experience an increase in the dollarisation...

Based on survey data from 193 banks in 20 countries we provide the first bank-level analysis of the determinants of foreign currency (FX) lending in emerging Europe. We find that FX lending by all banks, regardless of their ownership structure, is strongly determined by the macroeconomic...

Although microfinance institutions across the world are moving from group lending towards individual lending, this strategic shift is not substantiated by sufficient empirical evidence on the impact of both types of lending on borrowers. We present such evidence from a randomised field...

We use data on the 48 largest multinational banking groups to compare the lending of their 199 foreign subsidiaries during the Great Recession with lending by a benchmark group of 202 domestic banks. Contrary to earlier, more contained, crises, parent banks were not a significant source of...

We use data on 1,294 banks in emerging Europe to analyse how bank ownership and the Vienna Initiative affected credit growth during the 2008-09 crisis. As part of the Vienna Initiative western European banks signed country-specific commitment letters in which they pledged to maintain exposures...

We use a randomised controlled trial (RCT) to analyse the impact of microcredit on poverty reduction in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The study population are loan applicants that would normally have just been rejected based on regular screening. We find that access to credit allowed borrowers to...

The global financial crisis has reignited the debate about the risks of financial globalisation, in particular the international transmission of financial shocks. We use data on individual loans by the largest international banks to their various countries of operations to examine whether...