What determines the foreign aid effort of donor countries? We review the existing literature on donors' aid budgets and examine which of the suggested variables robustly determine aid effort, measured as Official Development Assistance (ODA) as a share of gross national income. More...

This paper investigates the impact of stock markets and banks on economic growth using a panel data set for the period 1976-98 and applying recent GMM techniques developed for dynamic panels. On balance, we find that stock markets and banks positively influence economic growth and these findings...

We propose a novel technique to measure three aspects of banks' sectoral concentration that feature prominently in episodes of intensi fied (systemic) bank risk: specialization (capturing overexposures), differentiation (capturing indirect connectedness), and fi nancial sector exposure...

This paper analyzes the distortions that banks' cross-border activities, such as foreign assets, deposits and equity, can introduce into regulatory interventions. We find that while each individual dimension of cross-border activities distorts the incentives of a domestic regulator, a balanced...

This paper documents large cross-country variation in the relationship between bank competition and bank stability and explores market, regulatory and institutional features that can explain this variation. We show that an increase in competition will have a larger impact on banks' fragility in...

This paper presents new data on the depth and penetration of mortgage markets across countries. We find a large variation across both dimensions of mortgage market development, both across countries but also – in terms of depth – within countries. Mortgage markets seem to develop only at...

“Everybody talks about financial innovation, but (almost) nobody empirically tests hypotheses about it” Frame and White (2004).The financial turmoil from 2007 onwards has spurred renewed debates on the “bright” and “dark” sides of financial innovation. Using bank-, industry- and...

“Everybody talks about financial innovation, but (almost) nobody empirically tests hypotheses about it”. Frame and White (2004)The financial turmoil from 2007 onwards has spurred renewed debates on the “bright” and “dark” sides of financial innovation. Using bank-, industry- and...

This paper documents large cross-country variation in the relationship between bank competition and bank stability and explores market, regulatory and institutional features that can explain this variation. We show that an increase in competition will have a larger impact on banks' fragility in...