We test the bank lending channel of monetary policy in Africa and examine the role of bank cost efficiency in this relationship. We use the stochastic metafrontier approach to estimate cost efficiency scores of 447 commercial banks in Africa. The Fixed Effect (FE) estimator is used as the...

We provide new evidence on the bank lending channel of monetary policy using bank-level data of 440 banks from eleven CEE transition economies between 1998 and 2012. Our findings are: i) banks adjust their loans to changes in host country’s monetary policy, ii) foreign-owned banks are less...

In seinem Kommentar setzt sich Wernhard Möschel, Universität Tübingen, mit den staatlichen Verantwortlichkeiten für die Finanzkrise auseinander und diskutiert die staatlichen Maßnahmen bzw. Vorschläge zu ihrer Behebung.

Seit dem Frühjahr 2003 erhebt das ifo Institut in seinen regelmäßigen Konjunkturumfragen bei deutschen Unternehmen der gewerblichen Wirtschaft Aussagen zur Kreditvergabe der Banken. Die Sonderfrage zur Kreditvergabe wurde bis zum August dieses Jahres halbjährlich gestellt, wird aber ab jetzt...

We use a method similar to Google's PageRank procedure to rank banks in the Canadian Large Value Transfer System (LVTS). Along the way we obtain estimates of the payment processing speeds for the individual banks. These differences in processing speeds are essential for explaining why observed...

Do banks play a special role in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy? I use the presence of internal capital markets in bank holding companies to isolate plausibly exogenous variation in the financial constraints faced by subsidiary banks. In particular, I demonstrate that affiliated...

Recently, economists have argued that a bank's importance within the financial system depends not only on its individual characteristics but also on its position within the banking network. A bank is deemed to be 'central' if, based on our network analysis, it is predicted to hold the most...

Insufficient capital buffers of banks have been identified as one main cause for the large systemic effects of the recent financial crisis. Although higher capital is no panacea, it yet features prominently in proposals for regulatory reform. But how do increased capital requirements affect...

The present paper refers to the field of "corporate convergence theory". A recent work on corporate convergence of Krishna et al. (2002) points out that there is little evidence that common standards in corporate fovernance have been implemented.Besides, in the same study (page 2) it is...