Nowadays foreign exchange interventions occur in emerging market economies whereas empirical studies on interventions mainly refer to advanced economies. However, interventions in emerging markets are different from those in advanced economies: they occur regularly and central banks have...

The village funds programme in Thailand is one of the biggest microfinance programmes in the world aiming at improving access to finance and income in rural areas. Earlier studies indicate that the programme is successful in realising its ambitions to some degree. We extend this work by...

Portfolio flows channeled via institutional investors were the most dynamic capital flows to emerging markets in the 1990s. We use an asymmetric information framework to derive five propositions, to integrate empirical evidence and to suggest policy implications. Opaque information in emerging...

Evidence from credit files is provided to examine bank lending determinants of Thai commercial banks. Their lending practice follows reasonable patterns as a standard set of variables, including indirect risk variables, explains much of the variance in interest rate spread. Reflecting...

Financial liberalisation has often failed in the past due to underestimated problems of structural change. We analyse such changes in lending behaviour of Thai commercial banks during a liberalisation phase by way of unique micro data. Liberalisation has expected positive effects, such as...

This paper examines whether recently introduced village funds", one of the largest microfinance programs ever implemented, improve access to finance. Village funds are analyzed in a cross-sectional approach in relation to competing financial institutions. We find, first, that they reach the...