Bank deregulation and progress in information technology altered the geographical diffusion of banking structures and instruments, and reduced operational distance between banks and local economies. Although, the consolidation of the banking industry promoted the geographical concentration of...

In the early 1990s, a widely shared opinion among scholars and practitioners was that the importance of physical proximity between banks and borrowers would be doomed to decrease drastically over time and, put in extreme terms, the end of banking geography would become a real possibility....

Recent empirical findings by (Elsas, 2005) and (Degryse and Ongena, 2007) document a U-shaped effect of market concentration on relationship lending which cannot be easily accommodated by the investment and strategic theories of bank lending orientation. In this paper, we suggest that this...

In the wake of the global crisis the International Monetary Fund (IMF) increased its exposure to low- and middle-income countries and boosted the overhaul of its lending approach to enhance its role in preventing crises. This paper tests whether IMF lending has targeted countries most affected...

In this paper we look at the effect of International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending programs on banking crises in a large sample of developing countries, over the period 1965-2010. The endogeneity of the Fund intervention is addressed by adopting an instrumental variable (IV) strategy, in which the...

In the wake of the global crisis the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has increased its exposure to developing countries and modified its lending approach to enhance its crisis prevention role. In this paper we examine whether, during the current crisis, IMF lending was actually directed at...

This paper investigates the effects of property taxation on fiscal discipline for a sample of OECD countries over the period 1973–2011. We find that aggregate property taxation in total tax revenues is not statistically correlated with the primary surplus-to-GDP ratio. In contrast, a greater...