The degree of an economy’s monetization, which has an important implication on economic growth, can be affected by the conduct of monetary policy, financial sector reform, and episodes of financial crises. The paper finds that monetization--measured by the ratio of broad money to nominal...

Financial inclusion has been one of the key pillars of Colombia’s development strategy for a number of years. Financial inclusion policies have aimed at channeling microcredit to poor, spreading formal banking system usage, fostering electronic payment acceptance, and making financial...

This paper explores the determinants of Japanese banks’ overseas expansion and assesses whether the growing cross-border activity will continue under the new macroeconomic policies referred as “Abenomics”. The analysis finds that Japanese banks are well positioned to scale up foreign...

What attracts conventional investors to Islamic financial instruments? We answer this question by comparing Malaysian Islamic and conventional security prices and their response to macrofinancial factors. Our analysis suggests that Islamic and conventional bond and equity prices are driven by...

This study investigates the advantage of social network mining in a customer retention context. A company that is able to identify likely churners in an early stage can take appropriate steps to prevent these potential churners from actually churning and subsequently increase profit. Academics...

Information and communication technologies (ICT) for health or eHealth solutions hold great potential for generating systemic efficiencies by strengthening five critical pillars of a health system: human resources for health, supply chain management, health care financing, governance and service...

In the past decades, the banking sector has come to be known in literature as the banking industry as it was geared to increasing profits, banks were growing, and banking products developed dynamically. It was believed that competition in the banking sector makes banks more efficient and...

We analyze the relationship between the intensity of banks’ use of soft-information and household bankruptcy patterns. Using a unique data set on the universe of Canadian household bankruptcies, we document that bankruptcy rates are higher in markets where the collection of soft, or...

Recent studies find that cash remains a dominant payment choice for small-value transactions despite the prevalence of alternative means of payment such as debit and credit cards. For policy makers an important question is whether consumers truly prefer using cash or merchants restrict card...

Much research looks at why customers switch service organizations but there has been less focus on why customers do not switch service organizations, even though they have seriously considered doing so. In light of this, we present an analysis of the literature and develop a list of potential...