This study examines how small and medium-size enterprises' (SMEs') lending and credit guarantee affect Korean banks' efficiency, by employing the stochastic frontier approach on 14 banks over the period 2001-2010. When lending increases to SMEs, the findings indicate that banks' cost efficiency...

This study provides a characterization of the Association of the South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) banking system's competition under the new environment that the implementation of the Financial Integration Framework (AFIF) implies. We focus on the largest banking markets in the region,...

Paradoxically, a plethora of empirical evidence in the traditional banking industry claims that smaller loans are associated with higher risk and the exact opposite is true for large loans. In this study we investigate these claims by estimating the relationship between loan sizes and credit...

This study examines the exposure of microfinance institutions to liquidity-, interest rate and foreign exchange (FX) risk. Using manually collected data from microfinance institutions' financial reporting, I find that the microfinance sector faces minimal liquidity risk, high interest rate risk...

This paper investigates whether financial development is conducive in poverty reduction. Separating financial development into four categories and using newly available data this paper finds that both financial deepening and greater physical access is beneficial in reducing the proportion of...

The adoption of mobile telephony to provide financial services in Africa has become instrumental in integrating the hitherto unbanked segments of the population to the mainstream financial systems. This study sought to establish this linkage by examining whether the pervasive use of mobile...

Expanding access to financial services holds the promise to help reduce poverty and foster economic development. However, little is still known about the determinants of the outreach of financial systems across countries. Our study is the first attempt to employ a large panel of countries,...

This paper examines the impact of monetary policy and central bank information on banks' lending using data on German bank balance sheets from 2002 to 2018. Local projection estimates show that the volume of loans to non-financial corporations declines significantly after a restrictive monetary...

The digital euro project will reach an important milestone this year when the preparation phase ends and the governing council of the ECB will decide whether to enter the next phase before the launch phase. This article provides an overview on how a digital euro is intended to work. An...