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...

This paper focuses on the stability aspects of cross-border banking. We first argue that cross-border banking brings about various benefits and costs for financial stability. Based on this, we draw conclusions for the desirability of cross-border banking in the EU, and derive implications for...

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...

According to conventional wisdom, the Basel II Accord - a set of capital adequacy standards for international banks drawn up by a committee of G-10 supervisors - is essential if we are to avoid another financial crisis. This paper argues that this conclusion is false: Basel II is not the...

In this study we try to find that whether markets take into account the phenomenon of Too Big to Fail. With the help of CDS market data, which reflects the risk, markets attribute on banks, we calculate the default probabilities of banks in one, two, and three years. Then we regress these...

This paper investigates whether there is any consistency between banks' financial strength ratings (bank rating) and their risk-return profiles. It is expected that banks with high ratings tend to earn high expected returns for the risks they assume and thereby have a low probability of...

During the last years, gravity equations have leapt from the trade literature over into the literature on financial markets. Martin and Rey (2004) were the first to provide a theoretical model for cross-border asset trade, yielding a structural gravity equation that could be tested empirically....

In an influential paper, La Porta, Lopez-De-Silanes and Shleifer (2002) argued that public ownership of banks is associated with lower GDP growth. We show that this relationship does not hold for all countries, but depends on a country's financial development and political institutions. Public...