In 1997, the Mexican government reversed long-standing policies and allowed foreign banks to purchase Mexico's largest commercial banks and relaxed restrictions on the founding of new, foreign-owned banks. The result has been a dramatic shift in the ownership structure of Mexico's banks. For...

The banking system is highly interconnected and these connections can be conveniently represented as an interbank network. This survey presents a systematic overview of the recent advances in the theoretical literature on interbank networks. We assess our current understanding of the structure...

Agents usually use a discrete set of prices to alleviate transaction costs for it reduces the bargaining time by reducing the amount of information that parties must exchange. On the other hand, if the discrete price set does not include an acceptable price for both parties, then some...

Annotated presentation made at the conference “Hacia una Mayor Competitividad e Integración de América Latina y el Caribe: la contribución de la banca de desarrollo”,on the occasion of the ALIDE Annual Meeting, Asunción, Paraguay, 19-20 May 2011. The paper describes first how regional...

The Mexican banking crisis of 1994/95 necessitated a major government rescue operation - estimated to have cost about 20 per cent of GDP. Since then, financial sector reforms have been implemented and the performance of the Mexican financial system has markedly improved, as shown by indicators...

This study focuses on equity, private debt, and asset-backed securities markets in Central America. These markets are generally under-developed throughout the region due to several structural problems, economic and political factors, and weaknesses in regulation and in institutional investor...

We analyze the role of institutional investors as providers of long-term capital resources in the Brazilian capital market. Since there is virtually only one provider of long-term financing in Brazil, BNDES - the National Bank for Economic and Social Development, and the fact that the domestic...

The costs of the private banking sector of Argentina are analyzed within the framework of efficiency: X-efficiency, economies of scale and economies of joint-production or scope. The estimations of X-inefficiency, according to the application of the Thick Frontier Approach, indicate a level of...

The bankruptcy of three big private banks (Econocirc;mico, Nacional and Bamerindus) in the beginning of the Plano Real has been attributed to the fast and intense growth of loan after the fall of inflation. The three banks balance sheet data, however, show a decrease in credit amount or a very...

From 1900 to 1935, Argentina evolved from an economy highly dependent on external, primarily British, finance to one more nearly self-sufficient. The authors examine the failure of domestic finance to adequately fill the void left by the decline of London and the breakdown of the world financial...