Pakistan undertook major financial sector reforms starting in the late 1980s. The effects of these reforms on the profitability and cost and revenue efficiency of the banking sector are evaluated. The revenue performance of all banks, and especially the privatized banks, improved significantly,...

This paper investigates the empirical relationship between competition in the financial sector and the creation of firms in the non-financial sector. It finds that bank competition has an overall positive effect on firm creation. However, consistent with theories of banking arguing that...

We empirically investigate the relevance of demand-side complementarity between electronic and traditional provision of banking services. Since no systematic data on prices for the two types of service is available, it is not possible to estimate cross-elasticities of demand. We resort to two...

Corporate governance theory predicts that leverage affects agency costs and thereby influences firm performance. We propose a new approach to test this theory using profit efficiency, or how close a firm's profits are to the benchmark of a best-practice firm facing the same exogenous...

This paper investigates the empirical relationship between competition in the financial sector and the creation of firms in the non-financial sector. It finds that bank competition has an overall positive effect on firm creation. However, consistently with theories of banking arguing that...

This study analyzes the main characteristics of loans for house purchase issued in Italy between 2004 and 2007 employing the data on individual contracts from the Sample Survey of Lending Rates. Variables describing the type of mortgage and the borrower are related to the ex post probability of...