We apply the new panel convergence methodology developed by Phillips and Sul (Econometrica, 2007) on thirteen financial development indices from the World Bank's Financial Development and Structure database, to test for financial system convergence across a large set of industrial and developing...

Over the past quarter century, the great wave of financial liberalization, together with advances in information-processing-technology and finance theory, created severe competitive pressures on both the asset and liability sides of bank balance sheets and, on the positive side, allowed banks to...