Does the level of deposits matter for bank fragility and efficiency? In a banking model with endogenous bank runs and a consumption-saving decision, we show that the level of deposits has opposite effects on bank fragility depending on the nature of bank runs. In an economy with panic-driven...

Recent evidence shows that the poor desperately need access to savings products. But despite this general consensus, microfinance institutions (MFIs) offering savings products are still under-studied. Using random-effect probit estimation on a dataset of 722 MFIs active over the 2005-2010...

Originally, U.S. savings banks were owned by their depositors. In recent decades, many savings banks have “demutualized”, by converting from customer to investor ownership. We examine the implications of such events for depositor welfare. We introduce a random coefficients logit model of...

The last decade was unique to the Brazilian banking market due to several institutional improvements that were reflected in a strong expansion of credit. Understand what were the channels of this expansion and how they impacted the market has been a recurring issue in the economic literature...

Our analysis finds that despite the growing number, the majority of savings banks currently do not make any payouts. Furthermore, savings banks distribute only a small part of their net profit to the shareholders. This means that they can build up capital even if they make payouts. Savings banks...

This paper reviews the literature on international comparative household finance. The paper presents summary statistics on household balance sheets for 13 developed countries, and uses these statistics to discuss common features and contrasts across countries. The paper then discusses retirement...

We investigate whether saving Wall Street through the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) really saved Main Street during the recent financial crisis. Our difference-in-difference analysis suggests that TARP statistically and economically significantly increased net job creation and net hiring...

At the time they occurred, the savings and loan insolvencies were considered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Contrary to what was then believed, and in sharp contrast with 2007-09, they in fact had little macroeconomic significance. S&L remediation cost between 2 and 3...

How does the presence of decentralized market-based liquidity channels affect financial liberalization and contagion? In order to answer this question, I extend the Diamond and Dybvig (1983) model of financial intermediation to a two-country environment, in which banks in each country enjoy a...

This paper examines whether some of the unbanked consumers' choice of general purpose reloadable (GPR) prepaid cards over checking accounts and alternative financial service (AFS) products can be explained by the cost incurred by those consumers. We compare the three types of products by...