Recent years have seen an intense and critical debate about the impact of microcredit on entrepreneurial activities and poor households' welfare. This paper suggests that information asymmetries in the ex-post loan arrangement between the microfinance institution (MFI) and local borrowers could...

In a recent study, Chami et al. (2003) suggested that remittances can have a negative impact on;economic growth of the receiving country by diminishing the work effort of the migrants' relatives.;Subsequently, Giuliano and Ruiz-Arranz (2009) found that this moral hazard effect emerges only;when...

The theoretical literature has discussed different channels through which foreign direct investments (FDI) promote host country's economic growth, but empirical analyses have so far been inconclusive. In this paper we provide evidence that FDI have a positive and statistically significant growth...

Recent empirical findings by Elsas (2005) and Degryse and Ongena (2007) document a U-shaped effect of market concentration on relationship lending whichvcannot be easily accommodated to the investment and strategic theory of relationship lending. In this paper, we show that this non-monotonicity...

The historical record shows that financial crises are far from being a rare a phenomenon; they occur often enough to be considered part of the workings of finance capitalism. While there is no single hypothesis that can best explain all crises, the implications of the credit boom-and-bust...

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...

Financial products are unstandardized and subject to a great deal of uncertainty. They tend to concentrate geographically because of the reduction in information costs resulting from close contacts. Concentration leads to economies of scale and encourages external economies. Great financial...

In the past fifteen years, cross-border mergers and acquisitions have had an ever increasing role in the process of bank internationalization. Although a consensus view has developed on the determinants of a bank’s decision to expand abroad and on the determinants of the patterns of expansion,...

In the early 1990s, a widely-shared opinion among scholars and practitioners was that the importance of physical proximity between banks and borrowers would be doomed to drastically decrease over time and, put in extreme terms, the end of banking geography would become a real possibility....

We study the effects of the interplay between banking deregulation and corporate governance on the lending behavior of savings banks in Spain. The removal of branching barriers that constrained these banks has led to a nationwide expansion, increasing the number of their branches and their...