Using a newly developed database for 8 transition economies, this paper examines whether reforms and political freedom are important for foreign bank entry. The paper provides strong evidence that foreign bank entry positively responds to reform measures. We also find some evidence for the...

Reliable estimates of the economy-wide losses associated with closedown of an industry are generally hard to obtain. In the input-output literature, numerous measures of the social value of industries were proposed. These measures are mostly based on comparative statics results, whereas a...

We explore the determinants of the number of bank relations of listed Japanese firms in a unique data set covering 1982-1999. Japanese firms had about 7 long-term and 8 short-term bank loan relations on average. We present a statistical description of the bank relations in terms of size,...

Recent contributions to growth theory stress the importance of localized innovation for the performance of more backward countries. In earlier papers, analyses by means of DEA techniques confirmed this intuition. In this paper, we extend this type of analysis by relaxing the macroeconomic...

This paper analyses whether societal norms help to explain cross-country differences in financial development. We analyze whether societal norms in addition to legal institutions have an impact on financial development. We address the implications of the inclusion of societal norms for the...