Robust GDP growth, declining unemployment, low and stable inflation, and a string of fiscal and current account surpluses -- it's a record to be envied. These outcomes in Canada owe much to sound macroeconomic policies, as well as to a favorable external environment. This book focuses on these...

Paper for a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York entitled Financial Innovation and Monetary Transmission

This paper studies why currency and monetary shock hit Indonesia's economy and banking sector so severely and the measures that were taken to deal with the banking crisis, the lessons learned, and challenges faced in restructuring and strengthening the banking system. The vulnerable state of the...

Heterogenous banking supervision and regulation is often considered as the most important impediment for Pan-European Bank mergers. In this paper we identify other more fundamental reasons for a limited degree of cross-country integration in retail banking. We argue that the distribution of...

Since the early 1990s an unprecedented process of consolidation has taken place in the banking sector in most industrialised countries raising concern of policymakers that it may reduce access to credit for the small business sector. While most of the existing empirical studies have focused on...

Despite extensive research interest in the last decade, the banking literature has not reached a consensus on the impact of bank mergers on deposit rates. In particular, results on the dynamics of deposit rates surrounding bank mergers vary substantially across studies. In this paper, we aim for...

The question of whether or not mergers and acquisitions have helped to enhance banks' efficiency and profitability has not yet been conclusively resolved in the literature. We argue that this is partly due to the severe methodological problems involved. In this study, we analyze the effect of...

In this paper, we investigate how bank mergers affect bank revenues and present empirical evidence that mergers among banks have a substantial and persistent negative impact on merging banks' revenues. We refer to merger related negative effects on banks' revenues as dissynergies and suggest...

This paper suggests a motive for bank mergers that goes beyond alleged and typically unverifiable scale economies: preemtive resolution of banks' financial distress. Such "distress mergers" can be a significant motivation for mergers because they can foster reorganizations, realize...

The recent decline in the Federal Reserve's check volumes has received a lot of attention. Although switching to electronic payments methods and electronic checkprocessing has been credited for much of that decline, some of it could be caused by changes following bank mergers involving Federal...