A decent budgetary portfolio is nothing more, and nothing less, than an accumulation of advantages that develop in quality and produce abundance money for the financial specialist to spend or reinvest. Markowitz (1959) is one of the pioneers of present day portfolio hypothesis. Generally, the...

Developments in information technology are fundamentally changing many traditional business models. Progress in the IT area is bringing about one change in particular: it is reducing search costs and allowing buyers and sellers of products and services to find each other directly on web-based...

The banks are known as the backbones of any economy. The banks link the saving surplus units with deficit units thereby providing investment and capital formation opportunities to both the units. In the recent times of financial shrinkages and up & down, the banking sector has witnessed various...

We review the empirical evidence on the impact of microcredit on poverty in Bangladesh. Drawing on evidence from seven empirical studies with 306 estimates, we examine the impact of microcredit on three proxies of poverty – income, assets and consumption/expenditure. After addressing issues of...

The study analyses the welfare performance of banks’ lending services in the Ghanaian banking industry with emphasis on the role of market power and efficiency. We made use of pooled OLS regression with fixed effect model. For robustness, we adopted Prais–Winsten (1954) regression and...

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the performance of microfinance institutions in The MENA region over the period 2006-2009. Following Simar and Wilson (1998, 2000) we use a DEA-Bootstrapping methodology to drift appropriate measures of DEA efficiency scores. The estimated results show...

The study employs macrodata on 42 African countries to examine whether remittances and financial development (including the sub-components of access, depth and efficiency) contribute to the equalisation of incomes across the continent. Robust evidence from the dynamic GMM estimator shows that:...

We identify the relative importance for lending of borrower (demand) versus bank (supply) factors. We submit thousands of fictitious mortgage applications, changing one borrower-level factor at time, to the major Italian online mortgage platform. Each application goes to all banks. We find that...

This paper identifies a precautionary banking liquidity shock via a set of sign, zero and forecast variance restrictions imposed. The shock proxies the banking sector's reluctance to lend to the real economy induced by an exogenous preference change for liquid assets. Through the lens of a DSGE...

For emerging market regulators, shadow banking represents an activity which they must control. For businessmen in economies like Russia, Argentina, Saudi Arabia and Mexico, shadow banking represents an important business opportunity. By extending credit to risky (but promising) activities...