There is a long-standing debate about the special nature of banks. Based on a unique dataset of legislative changes in industrial countries, we identify events that strengthen competition policy, analyze their impact on banks and non-financial firms and explain the reactions observed with...

The nexus between ownership and competition in the banking sector is a major concern to policymakers around the world but one that is rarely comprehensively examined. For 131 countries and 13 years we match bank ownership with over 50,000 bank-year estimates of individual bank market power. We...

We examine the impact of the international diversification by banks on the value of their advice in 1,705 cross-border merger and acquisition transactions. We find that bidders engaging internationally diversified advisors face lower announcement returns. A one standard deviation increase in...

We assess the relationship between finance and growth over the period 1980-2014. We estimate a cross-country growth regression for 48 countries during 20 periods of 15 years starting in 1980 (to 1995) and ending in 1999 (to 2014). We use OLS and IV estimations and we find that: 1) overall...

External imbalances played a pivotal role in the run-up to the global financial crisis, being an important underlying cause of the ensuing turmoil. While current account (flow) imbalances have narrowed in the aftermath of the crisis, net international investment position (stock) imbalances still...

This paper provides the first empirical evidence on how home-country regulation and supervision affects bank risk-taking in host-country markets. We analyze lending by 136 banks to 8,253 firms in 1,513 different localities across 13 countries. We find strong evidence that laxer regulatory...

This paper provides evidence on the strategic lending decisions made by banks facing a negative funding shock. Using bank-firm level credit data, we show that banks reallocate credit within their loan portfolio in at least three different ways. First, banks reallocate to sectors where they have...

We provide the first global estimates of profit shifting at the subsidiary-year level. Employing nonparametric estimation techniques within a mainstay model of profit shifting, we examine the subsidiary-year responses of earnings to the composite tax indicator faced by all subsidiaries of a...