This paper builds a new dataset on bank ownership and bank performance covering approximately 50,000 observations for 119 countries over the 1995-2002 period. The paper then uses the dataset to reassess the relationship between bank ownership and bank performance, providing separated estimations...

This paper examines whether bank ownership (public versus private, domestic versus foreign) is correlated with bank lending behavior over the business cycle. The paper finds that state-owned banks may play a useful credit-smoothing role because their lending is less responsive to macroeconomic...

Few would dispute that sovereign defaults entail significant economic costs, including, most notably, important output losses. However, most of the evidence supporting this conventional wisdom, based on annual observations, suffers from serious measurement and identification problems. To address...

This survey provides an in-depth analysis of existing research on the economic analysis of terrorism and counter-terrorist measures. First the existing evidence on the causes of terrorism is analyzed, then we consider the evidence of the consequences of terrorism and we demonstrate why it is...