Annotated presentation made at the conference “Hacia una Mayor Competitividad e Integración de América Latina y el Caribe: la contribución de la banca de desarrollo”,on the occasion of the ALIDE Annual Meeting, Asunción, Paraguay, 19-20 May 2011. The paper describes first how regional...

The Mexican banking crisis of 1994/95 necessitated a major government rescue operation - estimated to have cost about 20 per cent of GDP. Since then, financial sector reforms have been implemented and the performance of the Mexican financial system has markedly improved, as shown by indicators...

The Caribbean Community Council for Finance and Planning (COFAP) at its Twelfth meeting held in March 2008, decided that a major element of the integration programme for capital markets should be the formulation of a uniform securities law for adoption by Member States. At the meeting of COFAP,...

Agents usually use a discrete set of prices to alleviate transaction costs for it reduces the bargaining time by reducing the amount of information that parties must exchange. On the other hand, if the discrete price set does not include an acceptable price for both parties, then some...

The development of the Brazilian stock market has raised concerns about the practice of insider information, with several cases being documented in recent years. We hypothesize that insider trading is a form of corruption. As such, the higher the corruption level in a country, the more intense...

This Article maps financial crisis containment - extraordinary measures to stop the spread of financial distress - as a category of legal and policy choice. I make three claims.First, containment is distinct from financial regulation, crisis prevention and resolution. Containment is brief; it...

The Mexican banking crisis of 1994/95 necessitated a major government rescue operation - estimated to have cost about 20 per cent of GDP. Since then, financial sector reforms have been implemented and the performance of the Mexican financial system has markedly improved, as shown by indicators...

I use the stochastic frontier methodology to estimate a cost and a profit frontier functions. The Fourier-flexible form is used in this paper because of its flexibility. Results show that, although foreign banks are more cost efficient than domestic banks, domestic banks are more profit...

In the last few years, there has been an extensive debate as to whether ownership matters for bank performance in less developed countries. This paper investigates whether privately-owned banks outperform state-owned banks and whether foreign ownership enhances bank performance. Based on a range...

Aghion, Howitt and Mayer Foulkes postulate that one mechanism by which financial development enhances economic growth is by increasing a nation’s ability to obtain frontier technology, which then increases the rate at which productive activity expands. This study empirically tests this...