This paper assesses the extent to which debt overhang poses a constraint to economic activity in Emerging Europe, as the region emerges from the recent financial and economic crisis. At the macroeconomic level, it finds that the external imbalance problem for Emerging Europe has been in most...

This paper examines the impact of the recent banking crises in Europe and Central Asia on households' incomes and consumption patterns. The analysis is based on the 2010 wave of the Life in Transition Survey, which covers 12,704 households in eleven countries that experienced a banking crisis...

Based on survey data from 193 banks in 20 countries we provide the first bank-level analysis of the relationship between bank ownership, bank funding and foreign currency (FX) lending across emerging Europe. Our results contradict the widespread view that foreign banks have been driving FX...

We examine how asymmetric information and competition in the credit market affect voluntary information sharing between lenders. We study an experimental credit market in which information sharing can help lenders to distinguish goodborrowers from bad ones, because borrowers may exogenously...

This paper examines the impact of a public credit registry on the repayment behavior of borrowers. We implement an experimental credit market in which loan repayment is not third-party enforceable. We compare market outcome with a credit registry to that without a credit registry. This...

In Eastern Europe a substantial share of bank deposits are denominated in foreign currency. Deposit euroization poses key challenges for monetary policy and financial sector supervision. On the one hand, it limits the effectiveness of monetary policy interventions. On the other hand, it...

We examine how an innovation in payment technology impacts on consumer payment choice and cash demand. We study the staggered introduction of contactless debit cards between 2016-2018. The timing of access to the contactless technology is quasi-random across clients, depending only on the expiry...