Bank regulation might have contributed to or even reinforced adverse systemic shocks that materialised during the financial crisis. Capital regulation based on risk-weighted assets encourages innovation designed to circumvent regulatory requirements and shifts banks’ focus away from their core...

The Indian financial system has changed considerably since the 1990s. Interest rates have been deregulated and new entrants allowed in the banking and the securities business. The Indian equity market has become world-class. New private banks have emerged that are more customer-oriented than the...

We examine the consumer welfare effect of a firm's partial ownership of a competitor and compare the implications of alternative forms of divestiture. We identify conditions under which turning voting shares into non-voting shares is preferable to selling the shares to the firm's current...

This paper studies banks' competitive behavior on the deposit side of the Italian retail banking industry. We use a structural model to estimate demand for deposit services and test several supply models. We find that both the competitive, differentiated product Bertrand and the perfectly...

Switching costs are a key determinant of market performance. This paper tests their existence in the corporate loan market in which they are likely to play a central role because of the complexity of contracts and the relevance of informational problems. Using very detailed data at bank–firm...

Brazil under-invested in infrastructure for over three decades, and infrastructure investment rates have come up only slowly since 2007. Infrastructure needs are sizeable in almost all sectors. It is likely that at its current stage of development the country will benefit from large pay-offs...

Indonesia.s infrastructure is in poor shape, having suffered from protracted under-investment since the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, and constraints growth potential. This paper focuses on the current state of the regulatory framework and discusses different options for improvement...

We provide an efficiency justification for the imposition of the uniform pricing constraint in universal service obligations (USO), where USO are defined as a set of constraints imposed on firms belonging to a network industry. In addition to the uniform pricing (UP) constraint, which is an...