The financial services sectors of Romania and Estonia moved towards privatization in sharply contrasting manners. For a long time Romania's enthusiasm for its 1998 promise to the IMF to privatize its leading banks was only a commitment on paper; few steps were made towards its fulfillment. By...

Countries in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe (CESEE) experienced a credit boom-bust cycle in the last decade. This paper analyzes the roles of demand and supply factors in explaining this credit cycle. Our analysis first focuses on a large sample of bank-level data on credit growth for...

Do emerging markets need to sacrifice economic sovereignty in order to borrow more cheaply on the international capital markets? To explore this, we exploit a natural experiment following the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 when four Balkan states - Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia - received full...

For many years Russian domination of SE Europe’s gas imports meant it was regarded as “Russia’s market”. In the last 3 years, however, much new infrastructure has been commissioned, which has enabled the region to diversify its import mix and significantly change its gas flow patterns....