Depositor behavior has been associated with bank-specific characteristics, random runs, or contagion episodes. Using evidence on the 2000-02 bank runs in Argentina and Uruguay, this paper shows that macroeconomic risk is also important. Few macroeconomic shocks can quickly cause large runs....

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are important for employment and economic activity; however, they are perceived to lack adequate financing, which hampers their growth. As a consequence, governments have implemented a number of programs to foster SME lending and attention has focused on...

Despite the importance of remittances to developing countries, their impact on banking sector breadth and depth in recipient countries has been largely unexplored. We examine this topic using municipality-level data on the fraction of households receiving remittances and on measures of banking...

We analyze bank competition in Russia at different levels of aggregation. First, we compute a country-level measure of competition and compare it to that for similar-sized economies. Second, we contrast competition across different groups of banks in Russia. Third, we analyze bank competition...

Foreign bank participation has increased steadily across developing countries since the mid-1990s. This paper documents this trend and surveys the existing literature to explore the drivers and consequences of this phenomenon, paying particular attention to the differences observed across...

In recent years foreign banks have expanded their presence significantly in several developing economies. In Argentina and Chile in Latin America and in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in Eastern Europe, foreign-controlled banks now hold more than half of total banking assets. In other...

This paper examines the impact of bank ownership on credit growth in developing countries before and during the 2008-2009 crisis. Using bank-level data for countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America, it analyzes the growth of banks'total gross loans as well as the growth of corporate,...