What is the impact of foreign bank entry on the pricing and availability of credit in developing economies? The Mexican banking system provides a quasi-experiment to address this question because in 1997 the Mexican government radically changed the laws governing the foreign ownership of banks:...

While some authors view development banks as an important tool to alleviate capital constraints in scarce credit markets and unlock productive investments, others see those banks as conduits of cheap loans to politically-connected firms that could obtain capital elsewhere. We test these...