The costs of financial intermediation have important consequences for financial development. Using bank-level data for 160 countries during 2005-14, this paper analyzes the composition and sources of bank net interest margins. First, it uses an accounting decomposition framework to provide...

During the last years the lending business has come under considerable competitive pressure and bank managers often express concern regarding its profitability vis-a-vis other activities. This paper tries to empirically identify factors that are able to explain the financial performance of bank...