This paper deals with the question of knowing if countries whose activity of financing is mainly bank based face crises more expensive than those where the bond markets are broader and more developed. The results of the empirical tests on a panel of emerging countries suggest that bank based...

We investigated changes in the financial performance of representatives of the world’s top 200 commercial banks after the global subprime financial crisis. Our empirical results show that following the subprime-crisis disclosure, all commercial banks exhibited worse performance in asset...

This paper explores the impact of market discipline on bank risk taking. We examine a broad sample of financial institutions from the G7 nations over the period 1996–2010. We apply System Generalized Method of Moments estimation to control for endogeneity and other unobserved...

The house price and lending boom of the 2000s is widely considered to be the main cause of the financial crisis that began in 2007. However, looking to the past, we find a similar boom in the late 1980s which did not lead directly to a global systemic banking crisis – there were...

Private sector employment rose by over a million in the past three years. Commentators often interpret this number – which is a net figure – as ‘job creation’. But how many jobs really are created each year, and conversely how many are lost? How has this changed with...

If official figures overstated the growth of banking output in the UK in the recent boom, does this mean that GDP growth was overstated too? The answer is no. It is truer to say that if banking output was overstated then the output of some other industry or industries must have been understated,...

Cross-country divergence in credit availability to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) has been a salient feature of the recent Euro Area economic crisis. This paper uses firm level and macroeconomic data to identify heterogeneity in SME credit conditions within the Euro Area since 2009. By...

Using data on Indian banks for 1996–2008, the article examines the interconnection among credit growth, bank soundness and financial fragility. The analysis appears to indicate that higher credit growth amplifies bank fragility. Besides, the results point to the fact that sounder banks...

India's financial sector reforms, introduced in 1992, may have influenced the performance of commercial banks through a variety of channels. The present study is an attempt to examine the efficiency levels of Indian banks for the period 1985–2004. We employ stochastic frontier analysis to...

Literature on capital flows identifies various channels through which capital inflows could create financial fragility and economic instability in “developing and emerging economies.†Domestic credit expansion is one such channel. Capital inflows can lead to rapid expansion of domestic...