In recent years foreign banks have expanded their presence significantly in several developing economies. In Argentina and Chile in Latin America and in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in Eastern Europe, foreign-controlled banks now hold more than half of total banking assets. In other...

Argentina has been a leader among developing countries in restructuring its banking sector. The authors analyze the performance of those banks before and after privatization and estimate fiscal savings associated with privatizingArgentina's banks rather than keeping them public and later...

Recently, foreign bank participation has increased significantly in developing countries, fueling concerns that foreign banks might extend credit only to certain sectors, leaving customers like small businesses unattended. Using bank-level data for four Latin American countries during the...

In recent years, foreign bank participation has increased tremendously in several developing countries. In Argentina, Chile, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, for example, more than fifty percent of banking assets are now in foreign-controlled banks. In Asia, Africa, The Middle East, and...

Argentina's provinces offer a unique opportunity to study bank privatization because so many transactions took place there in so short a period in the 1990s (1994-98). As the decade started, every province owned at least one bank, performance in publicly owned provincial banks was substantially...

The authors analyze how foreign entry affected domestic banks in Argentina during an especially intense period of entry in the mid-1990s. Their results are consistent with the hypothesis that foreign banks enter areas where they have a competitive advantage, putting pressure on the domestic...

Existing evidence on the effect of foreign bank penetration on lending to small and medium-size enterprises is ambiguous. Case studies of developing countries show that foreign banks lend less to such firms than domestic banks do. But cross-country studies find that foreign bank entry fosters...

Based on results from country case studies, many researchers have claimed that political constraints affect bank privatization transactions, which in turn affect the post-privatization performance of the banking sector. But no study has either econometrically tested how political constraints...

In recent years foreign bank participation has increased tremendously in Latin America. Some observers argue that foreign bank entry will benefit Latin American banking systems by reducing the volatility of loans and deposits and increasing efficiency. Others are concerned that foreign banks...