The opening to foreign banks in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden provides us with an opportunity to study entry, survival and success in a situation where the entrants were subject to the liability of foreignness but not the liability of newness. We find that despite low survival rates, on...

The money we use has symbols and images on it that communicate information. One part of this are pictorial and symbolic elements that draw attention to aspects of the country that issuer is proud of and that convey the message that it wishes to convey. As one would expect, as regimes change, so...

In 2000 ten foreign banks owned the 12 largest US subsidiaries of foreign banks, which account for over 92% of the assets of all subsidiaries. The parent banks were large and tended to be from English-speaking countries. The novel result is that the parent was often the largest bank in its home...

Lottery-linked deposit accounts have proved to be popular around the world. From the point of view of a bank, these products are especially successful among relatively low-income customers, or in markets in which many people are outside the banking system. Below, we describe numerous examples of...

The system of denominations of US coins, which the paper treats as a quasi-genetic trait of the US monetary system, has not been constant since inception but rather has evolved over time in the sense of being subject to innovation and selection. However, all the innovations have disappeared, as...

The Barings, Daiwa Bank and Sumitomo Corp. financial debacles in the mid-1990s suggest that management failures rather than misfortune, errors, or complexity are a major source of the risk of financial debacles. These errors are systematic and are a concommittant of the structure of trading and...

Why are there such severe problems in lending in the transition countries? This research took a microeconomic and institutional look at part of the problem. We conducted interviews in Bulgaria and Hungary and sought answers to two questions. First, how do banks making "normal" loans insure that...

Singapore's "Big 4" banks, plus the newly merged Keppel TatLee Bank, have offices throughout the Asia-Pacific area, in London and North America as well and are also acquiring banks in Asia. Several factors have been particularly salient in explaining the timing and location of their expansion:...