Banking crises have been a recurrent phenomenon in Latin America over the past few decades. Some have argued that the internationalization of the banking sector has ushered in a new era: what used to be systemic risk from the perspective of local banks with undiversified portfolios might no...

This paper analyzes the causes and consequences of offshore financial centers (OFCs). Since OFCs are likely to be tax havens and money launderers, they encourage bad behavior in source countries. Nevertheless, OFCs may also have unintended positive consequences for their neighbors, since they...

The effect of the unification of the European banking market on the efficiency of the allocation of capital across Europe depends on the economic forces behind banking structure. Such forces are not well understood. The paper discusses a conceptual framework for analyzing financial services...

The paper develops an empirical model to explain growth of total assets of a sample of the world's largest banks. The model was estimated over a period in which U.S. banks' assets grew less rapidly than the assets of large banks headquartered in other industrial countries. The model provides an...

The EC program to complete the internal market is designed to allow the free movement of goods, persons, services, and capital within the Community by the target date of December 31, 1992. This paper provides a comprehensive description and analysis of the EC program for the financial sector,...

The Federal Reserve Board permitted banking offices located in the United States to establish International Banking Facilities (IBFs) beginning in December 1981. The purpose was to allow these banking offices to conduct a deposit and loan business with foreign residents, including foreign banks,...

We model two dimensions of bank globalization -- bank nationality (a bank from the firm's host nation, its home nation, or a third nation) and bank reach (a global, regional, or local bank) -- using a two-stage nested multinomial logit model. Our data set includes over 2,000 foreign affiliates...