This paper examines the impact of bank ownership on credit growth in developing countries before and during the 2008-2009 crisis. Using bank-level data for countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America, it analyzes the growth of banks'total gross loans as well as the growth of corporate,...

This paper provides the first comprehensive documentation of how firms use domestic and international corporate bond markets. Debt issues in domestic and international markets have different characteristics, not explained by differences across firms or countries. International issues tend to be...

Remittances are a substantial source of external financing for developing countries that influence many aspects of their development. Though research has shown that remittances are both expensive and price sensitive, little is known about what explains their price. Newly gathered data across 119...

This paper proposes a framework to analyze competition in the banking sector using Jordan as an example. In particular, the paper pursues a multi-pronged approach to analyze competition including (i) an examination of the extent to which the market is contestable (that is, has low barriers to...

The Russian banking sector includes approximately 1,000 banks, but is it competitive? This paper analyzes bank competition in Russia during 2002-2008. The authors examine indicators of concentration and contestability, and compute non-structural measures of competition. They compare competition...

Using firm-level surveys for up to 73 countries, this paper explores the impact of introducing collateral registries for movable assets on firms' access to bank finance. It compares firms’ access to bank finance in seven countries that introduced collateral registries for movable assets...

Recently, developing countries have witnessed a sharp increase in foreign bank participation. The authors examine the impact on banking outreach using newly gathered data for Mexico, where foreign bank participation rose from 2 percent to 83 percent of assets during 1997-2005. Country-, bank-,...

This paper is an empirical study of the determinants of Latin American devaluations during the period between 1957 and 1988. The estimation of probabilities of devaluation is done using logit analysis. The empirical results show that reserves, the real exchange rate, the share of domestic credit...

Combining multi-year, firm-level surveys with country-level panel data for 53 countries, the authors explore the impact of bank competition on firms'access to finance. They find that low competition, as measured by high values of the Lerner index, diminishes firms'access to finance, while...