This paper provides a critical assessment of the costs and benefits of foreign bank ownership. It reviews the extensive literature on the impact of foreign banks and uses a unique database on bank ownership, covering 129 countries, to (re-) examine a number of the issues discussed. It documents...

This paper provides a critical assessment of the costs and benefits of foreign bank ownership. It reviews the extensive literature on the impact of foreign banks and uses a unique database on bank ownership, covering 129 countries, to (re-)examine a number of the issues discussed. It documents...

In the past fifteen years, cross-border mergers and acquisitions have had an ever increasing role in the process of bank internationalization. Although a consensus view has developed on the determinants of a bank’s decision to expand abroad and on the determinants of the patterns of expansion,...

This study investigates how heterogeneous firms choose their lenders when they raise external finance for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and how the choice of financing structure affects FDI activities. We establish an asymmetric information model to analyze why certain firms use private bank...

This paper studies the determinants of global liquidity using data on cross-border bank flows, with a longer time series and broader country sample than previous studies. We define global liquidity as non-price determinants of cross-border credit supply, consistent with its meaning as the...

This paper examines the international credit portfolios of German banks. We construct a bank-country panel from a unique dataset for a representative set of countries and ask why banks leave diversification opportunities unexploited in some countries. Controlling for bank heterogeneity, we...

In the aftermath of the 2007–2009 crisis, banks claiming positive diversification benefits are being met with skepticism. Nevertheless, diversification might be important and sizable for some large internationally active banking groups. We use a universally applicable correlation matrix...

This paper analyses the determinants of banks’ loan loss allowances for samples of US banks and three non-US samples: a group of 21 countries, Canada and Japan. The model includes fundamental (or non-discretionary) determinants of the allowance such as non-performing loans, and discretionary...