Most banks in Paraguay appear resilient to shocks, although the exposure to large borrowers is high. The mission strongly recommends the adoption of measures that would moderate credit growth and induce financial institutions to build cushions that can protect them and their clients from a...

A large theoretical literature shows that competition reduces banks' franchise values and induces them to take more risk. Recent research contradicts this result: When banks charge lower rates, their borrowers have an incentive to choose safer investments, so they will in turn be safer. However,...

In 2001, government guarantees for savings banks in Germany were removed following a law suit. We use this natural experiment to examine the effect of government guarantees on bank risk taking, using a large data set of matched bank/borrower information. The results suggest that banks whose...

This paper explains the continuing success of European cooperative banks through evolving comparative advantages. It points out that a cooperative is built around an intergenerational endowment without final owners, which creates particular governance challenges. Risks include the use of the...

This paper examines the role of government guarantees to domestic banks in generating moral hazard in pre-crisis East Asian economies. We test for moral hazard among bank creditors by determining whether protected banks received more funds from creditors than otherwise identical banks that did...

Based on detailed regulatory intervention data among German banks during 1994-2008, we test if supervisory measures affect the likelihood and the timing of bank recovery. Severe regulatory measures increase both the likelihood of recovery and its duration while weak measures are insignificant....

During the last decades banks have progressively moved towards centralized and hierarchical organizational structures. Therefore, the investigation of the determinants of bank efficiency and relationships with the functional distance between the bank head-quarter and operational units have...

The aim of this study is to examine the persistence of profit and the effect of bank-specific determinants of Tunisian bank profitability. To account for profit persistence, we apply a dynamic panel model, using Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM) system for 16 Tunisian commercial banks,...

In this paper, we investigate how bank mergers affect bank revenues and present empirical evidence that mergers among banks have a substantial and persistent negative impact on merging banks’ revenues. We refer to merger related negative effects on banks’ revenues as dissynergies and suggest...

The paper analyzes the efficiency and productivity of the most important banking system from 2006-08 and tries to address the long-term challenges posed by the global financial crisis. A non-parametric frontier analysis (DEA) is applied to estimate the relative efficiency of banks segments in...