This paper measures how both geographical and cultural proximity of bank branches affect household credit choice and pricing. We examine both types of proximity jointly to separately identify the importance of soft information versus alternative mechanisms. Using a detailed household-level...

The financial services industry is „special“ in a variety of ways, including the fiduciary nature of the business, its role at the center of the payments and capital allocation process with all its static and dynamic implications for economic performance, and the systemic nature of problems...

CEE countries such as Poland started to experience a very high rate of financial development within a few years after emerging from socialism. A review of the literature suggests that this asymmetric development should have been most beneficial for those industry sectors most dependent on...

Rajan and Zingales (1998) use U.S. Compustat firm data for the 1980s to obtain measures of manufacturing sectors? Dependence on External Finance (DEF). They take any differences in these measures to be structural/technological and thus applicable to other countries. Their joint assumptions about...

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether the banking system, over and beyond its credit function, has a significant impact on per capita GDP by providing means of payment. An annual database of 85 countries spanning the 1980-2008 period is exploited to this end. On the descriptive front,...

The stability of the financial system at higher loss levels is either characterized by asymptotic dependence or asymptotic independence. If asymptotically independent, the dependency, when present, eventually dies out completely at the more extreme quantiles, as in case of the multivariate...

We propose a simple network–based methodology for ranking systemically important financial institutions. We view the risks of firms –including both the financial sector and the real economy– as a network with nodes representing the volatility shocks. The metric for the connections of the...

Since 1992 Ethiopia has been engaged in liberalizing its financial sector. The hallmark of the strategy is gradualism. The approach is not without problems especially from Bretton Woods Institutions that saw the reform as a sluggish process. This study examines this liberalization program by...

In January 2007 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published, on an ad hoc basis, a series of financial soundness indicators (FSIs) based on a common methodology (the IMF compilation Guide) for 62 countries, including all 27 European Union countries. The European Central Bank (ECB), jointly...

Several developing economies witnessed a large number of systemic financial and currency crises since the 1980s which resulted in severe economic, social, and political problems. The devastating impact of the 1982 and 1994-95 Mexican crises, the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, the 1998 Russian...