Banks play a central role in financing and monitoring firms in transition economies. We study how bank competition affects the efficiency of the credit allocation, the monitoring of firms, and the firms' restructuring effort. In our model, banks compete to finance an investment project with...

This paper investigates to what extent risk management and corporate governance mitigate the involvement of banks in credit boom and bust cycles. Using a unique, handcollected dataset on 156 banks from Central and Eastern Europe during 2005-2012, we assess whether banks with stronger risk...

Since the process of economic reform began in China, the Chinese banking system has grown impressively. The aim of this paper is therefore to examine the differences in operational efficiency between China's state-owned commercial banks (SCBs) and shareholding commercial banks using pooled...

China's banking system reform has made notable progress since 2002. After restoring their balance sheets, Chinese banks have aggressively increased lending and contributed to supporting the country' s economy given the global financial crisis. Thus far, the regulated deposit and lending interest...

This study examines the cost and profit efficiency of banking sectors in six transition countries of South-Eastern Europe over the period 1998–2008. Using the stochastic frontier approach, our analysis reveals that the average cost efficiency of SEE banks is 68.59% and the average profit...

In the recent financial crisis, macroeconomic stimuli produced mixed results across developed economies. In contrast, China's stimulus boosted real GDP growth from an annualized 6.2% in the first quarter of 2009 trough to 11.9% in the first quarter of 2010. Amidst this phenomenal response, land...

By introducing a new measure of the banking systems' size, the paper challenges the existing consensus on severe underdevelopment of the CEE banking sectors. We argue that the existing studies on the size of CEE banking systems exaggerate the real degree of underdevelopment because common...

In CIS Central Asia, the institutional economic framework is found to be remarkably heterogeneous across the region: Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz Republic are market-oriented reforming economies, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan can be characterized as hybrid economies, while Turkmenistan remains largely...

The structural reforms under way in Eastern Europe have revealed the weakness of the banking sector there; macroeconomic stability and other reforms are thereby threatened. A model is developed that clarifies the role of banking in an emerging market economy and the danger that the disturbances...