We study the effect of financial integration (through banks) on the transmission of international business cycles. In a sample of 18/20 developed countries between 1978 and 2009 we find that, in periods without financial crises, increases in bilateral banking linkages are associated with more...

Merchants pay interchange fees to card issuers when they accept credit or debit cards as payment. Many merchants have complained that the fees far exceed issuers' costs for processing such transactions. In response to those complaints, Congress directed the Federal Reserve to impose a cap on...

The current financial crisis has been characterized as a “Minsky” moment, and as such provides the conditions required for a reregulation of the financial system similar to that of the New Deal banking reforms of the 1930s. However, Minsky’s theory was not one that dealt in moments but...

As the financial and physical markets for energy have increasingly become intertwined, energy trade is also covered by financial legislation. The European Commission wishes to strengthen this financial regulation of energy trade. It has put forward a set of regulatory proposals aimed at...

Banking integration is generally linked to price convergence. In addition to interest rates, we argue that lending margins provide important information regarding price setting convergence in banking sectors. House purchase and nonfinancial corporations (NFC) lending margins confirm that EU...

The paper studies the evolution and determinants of banking integration across European countries, including New Member States, with attention to the impact that the Euro might have on that process. It is the first time that banking integration is being studied using the data on international...

How do financial development and financial integration interact? We focus on Japan’s Great Recession after 1990 to study this question. Regional differences in banking integration affected how the recession spread across the country: financing frictions for credit-dependent firms were more...

The current crisis has led to an unprecedented collapse in international capital flows, with substantial heterogeneity across regions. Asian economies were relatively unaffected, despite having been the center of the storm in the crisis of the late 1990s. The contraction in capital flows for...

To investigate the banking sector integration across euro area countries in terms of loan interest rate stickiness, we estimate structural loan rate curves for 12 euro area countries using time-varying regressions with stochastic volatility. Our results show that the loan rates are sticky to a...