The international activity of U.S. banks has grown relatively rapidly during the 1990s, as both the trading and derivatives activities of their foreign offices and their cross-border lending have increased. The growth has taken place mainly in relation to the Group of Ten and other industrial...

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...