This essay reflects upon the relationship between the current theory of financial intermediation and real-world practice. Our critical analysis of this theory leads to several building blocks of a new theory of financial intermediation. Current financial intermediation theory builds on the...

Many distinguish between financial systems with a dominant role for banks and those with a dominant role for financial markets, assuming this is of great importance for economic development. The author analyses why the distinction might matter, first by investigating how bank and market finance...

Many distinguish between financial systems with a dominant role for banks and those with a dominant role for financial markets, assuming this is of great importance for economic development. The author analyses why the distinction might matter, first by investigating how bank and market finance...

Using a dynamic panel model for more than 15 000 banks from 148 countries from 1988 to 2010, we investigate the interaction between size, growth and profitability of banks. For our total sample, we cannot reject the hypotheses that the variability of bank profitability and the level and...

We investigate whether international fund flows are pro-or counter-cyclical by employing a concordance index. International fund flows are investments in bond and equity markets by institutional investors, such as mutual funds, exchange traded funds, closed-end funds and hedge funds. We find...

We investigate the drivers of excess interbank liquidity in Pakistan, using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach on weekly data for December 2005 to July 2011. We find that the financing of the government budget deficit by the central bank and non-banks leads to persistence in excess...

This paper tests Uncovered Interest Rate Parity (UIP) using LIBOR rates for the major international currencies for the period January 2001 to December 2008. We find that UIP generally holds over a short-term horizon for individual and groups of currencies. Our results suggest that it is...