Despite progress in the past decade, financial markets in Colombia remain relatively small and shallow. In particular the banking system suffers high intermediation costs, which limit constrains access to finance by households and firms. This paper explores some of the causes behind these...

A model of loan rate competition with liquidity provision by banks is used to study bank mergers. Both loan rate competition and liquidity needs are seen to be "localised" phenomena. This allows for tracing down the effects of particular types of bank mergers. As such, we contrast the effects of...

We model the impact of bank mergers on loan competition, reserve holdings and aggregate liquidity. A merger creates an internal money market that affects reserve holdings and induces financial cost advantages, but also withdraws liquidity from the interbank market. Loan market competition...

This paper studies the impact of financial inclusion on wealth accumulation. Exploiting the US interstate branching deregulation between 1994 and 2005, we find that an exogenous expansion of bank branches increases low-income household financial inclusion. We then show that financial inclusion...

We study how information sharing between banks influences the geographical clustering of branches. A spatial oligopoly model first explains why branches cluster and how information sharing impacts price competition and equilibrium clustering. With data on 59,333 branches of 676 banks in 22...

The traditional avoidance literature undeservedly neglects tax base distribution as a factor affecting the avoidance price, and generally assumed to be equal to the avoidance cost. In reality, avoidance providers are usually either high-skilled specialists or insiders. The strong collusion thus,...

The principal agent problem is one of the major issues of the credit rating agency market. Is it possible to solve the prevailing incentive problem of the market and contemporaneously satisfy the reputation demand of the investors? This paper presents an option for regulating the credit rating...

Under the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM), introduced in 2014, systemically important euro area banks with combined assets of about 21,000 billion euros are directly supervised by the ECB. We examine from a static and a dynamic perspective how this fundamental shift to unified supervision...

We study how risk management through hedging impacts firms and competition among firms in the life insurance industry - an industry with over 7 Trillion in assets and over 1,000 private and public firms. We show that firms that are likely to face costly external finance increase hedging after...

Interest rate caps, also called usury ceilings, are a widely used policy tool to protect consumers from excessive charges by loan providers. However, they are often cited as a barrier for the advancement of financial inclusion, as they may reduce the incentives to provide loans to lower-income...