The operating target for monetary policy in the U.S. has changed from borrowings in the late 1980s to a target range for the fed funds rate to a specific fed funds target. In addition, secrecy about the policy target has largely disappeared and since 1994 policy targets have been announced...

Privatization of the banking sector is usually viewed as the way to create market oriented banking sectors in formerly planned or transition economies. However, bank privatization is only part of the requisite story. Market-oriented banking requires the disengagement of the state from direct...

The formerly planned economies (FPEs) of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are a rather disparate group of nations with widely differing financial structures. In some of the countries of Eastern Europe the financial infrastructure is beginning to assume the characteristics that are...

In this paper we examine the role of syndicated loan markets in financial market development in 24 European countries. We find credit spreads to be negatively related to market size in small markets and positively related in large financial markets. Syndicated loans play a different role in...

Privatization of the banking sector is usually viewed as the way to create market oriented banking sectors in formerly planned or transition economies. However, bank privatization is only part of the requisite story. Market-oriented banking requires the disengagement of the state from direct...

To investigate the impact of bank privatization in transition countries, we take the largest banks in six relatively advanced countries, namely, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Romania. Income and balance sheet characteristics are compared across four bank ownership...

In this paper we examine risk taking and risk management with the help of a new survey data set from EBRD. We do so in this paper with the familiar balance sheet and income data prepared by Bank Scope and also with information from the EBRD's 2005 survey of bank managers. We find no indication...

Although the finance-growth relationship is now firmly entrenched in the empirical literature, we show that it is not as strong in more recent data as it was in the original studies with data for the period from 1960 to 1989. We consider two related explanations. First, excessive financial...

Better developed legal and political institutions result in greater availability of reliable firm-specific information. When stock prices reflect more firm-specific information there will be less stock price synchronicity. This paper traces the experience of China, an economy undergoing dramatic...

There are two areas of economic research that are closely related but have until recently developed independently. The first is the literature on the finance growth nexus that has shown how countries with greater financial depth grow more rapidly. The second is the literature on credit and...