This paper investigates the willingness and barriers to adoption of mobile money merchant accounts by the informal businesses in Burkina Faso. We use business survey data from a quasi-experimental opening of mobile money merchant accounts that we conducted in March 2021. Our data enable us to...

We investigate whether the use of mobile money can help individuals build savings to face predictable and unpredictable life events. Studying the case of Burkina Faso, we use hand-collected data from individual responses to a survey we designed and conducted between May and June 2014. Our main...

We investigate how bank charter value affects risk for a sample of OECD banks by using standalone and systemic risk measures before, during, and after the global financial crisis of 2007-2008. Prior to the crisis, bank charter value is positively associated with risk-taking and systemic risk for...

This paper investigates bank portfolio composition under Basel II where the amount of required capital is determined by bank's own risk assessment. We particularly show that in presence of asymmetric information between the bank and the supervisor, it has incentives to understate its risk taking...

We depart from the fact that in Europe, unlike the leverage ratio, risk-based capital ratios are formally under capital regulation with specified minimum thresholds to be respected. Building on this difference, we study their comparative persistence and convergence. For this purpose, we borrow...

Using a sample of European commercial banks over the period 1993-2006, we show that market discipline significantly and positively affects banks' capital buffer. By distinguishing junior from senior debt holders, we find that both types of investors exert a pressure on banks to hold more capital...

This paper examines whether mobile money adoption can induce informal firms to formalize, an aspect that has been overlooked in the empirical literature. Despite several regulatory reforms such as simplifying tax systems and reducing the costs and time needed to register a business, informality...