This paper documents a large cross-country variation in the relationship between bank competition and stability and explores market, regulatory and institutional features that can explain this heterogeneity. Combining insights from the competition-stability and regulation-stability literatures,...

This paper discusses the medium- to long-term perspectives for the Irish banking system. Consistent with the finance-growth literature, financial deepening had a limited impact on growth in Ireland before the crisis and cannot be expected to contribute significantly over the short to medium...

This paper uses cross-country firm-level surveys to gauge access to financial services and the importance of financing constraints for African enterprises. The paper compares access to finance in Africa and other developing regions of the world, within Africa across countries, and across...

Using a novel way to identify relationship and transaction banks, we study how banks’ lending techniques affect funding to SMEs over the business cycle. For 21 countries we link the lending techniques that banks use in the direct vicinity of firms to these firms’ credit constraints at two...

Using a novel way to identify relationship and transaction banks, we study how banks' lending techniques affect funding to SMEs over the business cycle. For 21 countries we link the lending techniques that banks use in the direct vicinity of firms to these firms' credit constraints at two...

This article provides an introduction to the special issue. We focus on four themes that are important for policymakers and researchers alike in view of the experiences of the global financial crisis of 2007–09 and the ensuing sovereign debt crisis in the euro area: the relevance of the...

Cross-border banking has been a critical part of Africa's financial history since colonial times. While the period after independence saw a wave of nationalization across the continent, with many of the colonial banks exiting, this trend was reversed in the 1980s with the arrival of financial...

Using a novel enterprise survey from Kenya (FinAccess Business), we document a strong positive association between the use of mobile money as a method to pay suppliers and access to trade credit. We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous entrepreneurs, imperfect credit...

Data depth measures the centrality of a point with respect to a given distribution or data cloud. It provides a natural center-outward ordering of multivariate data points and yields a systematic nonparametric multivariate analysis scheme. In particular, the halfspace depth is shown to have...