The globalisation of financial markets has attracted much academic and policymaking commentary in recent years, especially with the growing number of banking and financial crises and the current credit crisis that has threatened the stability of the global financial system. This major new...

Bank-based systems of corporate governance are certainly an alternative in many Asian economies. In spite of the great efforts directed to strengthening corporate governance along the Anglo- American model in recent years, the effectiveness of this model is far from being clear. Among other...

This paper discusses the so-called commercial approach to microfinance under economic and ethical aspects. It first shows how microfinance has developed from a purely welfare-oriented activity to a commercially relevant line of banking business. The background of this stunning success is the...

The choice between foreign direct investment (FDI) and exports has been a recurrent theme in the literature on international trade, yet few studies have analysed this choice at the level of the individual firm. This paper uses a new dataset to study the FDI-versus-exports decision for banks. We...

This paper studies the nature of spillover effects in bank lending flows from advanced to the emerging market economies and identifies specific channels through which such effects occur. Based on a gravity model we examine a panel data set on cross-border bank flows from 17 advanced to 28...