This paper reviews the nature of central bank involvement in 26 episodes of financial disturbance and crises in Latin America from the mid-1990s onwards. It finds that, except in a handful of cases, large amounts of central bank money were used to cope with large and small crises alike. Pouring...

The study documents evidence of a "quality effect" of financial liberalization on allocative efficiency, which is measured by the dispersion in Tobin's Q across firms. Based on a simple model, the authors predict that financial liberalization, by equalizing access to credit, reduces the...

This paper investigates the role of creditor rights and information sharing in explaining why some financial markets in sub-Saharan Africa have remained shallow. The paper finds that while financial liberalization and macroeconomic stability promote financial deepening, they are not enough. For...

Staff Discussion Notes showcase the latest policy-related analysis and research being developed by individual IMF staff and are published to elicit comment and to further debate. These papers are generally brief and written in nontechnical language, and so are aimed at a broad audience...

Only a minority of countries have succeeded in establishing a developed financial system, despite widespread financial liberalization. Confronted with this finding, the political institutions view claims that sustained financial deepening is most likely to take place in institutional...

L’objectif de cette étude est d’une part de mesurer les effets des réformes financières sur l’efficacité et la productivité des banques de la zone UEMOA sur la période de 1996 à 2006 et, d’autre part, de faire ressortir les principaux déterminants managériaux de l’efficacité...

Credit to the private sector has been growing very rapidly in a number of Central and Eastern European countries in recent years. The main question is whether this dynamics is an equilibrium convergence process or may rather pose stability risks. Using panel econometric techniques, this paper...

The influence of financial deepening on income inequality in developed economies is studied with particular interest in the European Union member states that have large penetration of bank credit. Building on the model of financially open economies (Kunieda et al, 2014) and extending its...

Who uses mobile money? What is mobile money used for? This paper describes the mobile money adoption patterns following the experimental introduction of mobile money for the first time in rural areas of Southern Mozambique. We use a combination of administrative and household survey data to...

This paper examined the direction of causality between financial deepening and economic growth in Nigeria for the period 1970-2013. The study adopted the Toda-Yamamoto augmented Granger causality test and results showed that the growth-financial deepening nexus in Nigeria follows the...