Earlier studies have documented that foreign banks charge lower lending rates and interest spreads than domestic banks. We hypothesize that this may stem from the superior efficiency of foreign entrants that they decide to pass onto borrowers (“performance hypothesis”), but could also...

Using data for 265 banks in the Central and Eastern European Countries for the period of 1995-2003, this paper analyses the differences in profitability between domestic and foreign banks. We show that foreign banks, especially greenfield institutions, earn higher profits than domestic banks....

As a number of European banks was touched by the American subprime crisis, there is a new urgency to consider the pros and cons of the ongoing globalization of the banking sector. In this letter, we aim to describe foreign exposures of French banks and compare them to the situation in other...

In this study, using a combination of propensity score matching and difference-in-difference techniques, we investigate the impact of foreign bank ownership on the performance and market power of acquired banks operating in Central and Eastern Europe. This approach allows us to control for a...

In the context of the financial crisis, many projects of bank levies have emerged. Yet, there is very little evidence on the incidence of bank taxes and, hence, it is not clear who will bear the burden of the new taxes. In this paper, we investigate the ability of banks to shift corporate income...

This is the first analysis of the incidence of a bank tax that is imposed on banks’ balance sheets. Within the framework of an oligopolistic version of the Monti-Klein model, the pass-through of a bank tax levied on loans is stronger when elasticity of credit demand is low. To test this...