From the 1980s onwards the banking sectors in all the industrialised countries have been experiencing intense restructuring, aggregation and consolidation, radically changing their ownership structures and geography. Whatever the reasons behind such restructuring processes, the globalisation of...

A growing body of research is focusing on banking organizational issues, emphasizing the difficulties encountered by hierarchically organized banks in lending to informationally opaque borrowers. While the two extreme cases of hierarchical and non-hierarchical organizations are typically...

There is a broad consensus that the current, large U.S. current-account deficits financed with foreign capital inflows at low interest rates cannot continue forever; there is much less consensus on when the system is likely to end and how badly it will end. The paper resurrects the basic...

This paper reports tests of hypotheses that a variety of interest rates and other measures from financial markets in countries belonging to the European Monetary Union (EMU) were converging prior to the introduction of the euro in January 1999. We expected to find convergence because of i)...

Traditionally female entrepreneurs report difficulties or higher costs in accessing bank credit. These difficulties can be either the result of supply side discrimination, or the lower profitability of female-owned firms than male-owned ones. This paper aims at analyzing the access to credit of...