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Recent developments have increased questions about vulnerabilities in Central and Eastern European Countries (CEE) that are experiencing credit booms. This paper analyzes the role of foreign-owned banks in these credit booms. The results show that the CEE countries depend on foreign banks, and these foreign banks depend on interbank funding. Lending by foreign banks seems driven by economic growth and interest rate margins. This lending appears independent of economic but not financial conditions in the foreign bank's home country.

This paper investigates the role of local context, with regard to the effect of local financial development and banking concentration, on a firm’s probability of bankruptcy at the post-creation stage. Our empirical setting is based on the logit multilevel model that better allows the treatment of data referring to different levels of aggregation (firm and local variables) applied to companies located in Italy. We find that a higher level of financial development in a province decreases the likelihood of corporate bankruptcy. This result is robust considering a 2SLS regression in which we use instruments for the local financial development and for the concentration of bank branches. In addition, our estimations suggest that the effect of local financial development and bank concentration is shaped by size. Local financial development is particularly significant for small firms, which traditionally suffer from great difficulty in accessing credit, whereas local banking concentration reduces the probability of bankruptcy for medium-sized firms.

We show that a competitive banking system is inconsistent with an optimum quantity of private money. Because bankers cannot commit to their promises and the composition of their assets is not publicly observable, a positive franchise value is required to induce the full convertibility of bank liabilities. Under perfect competition, a positive franchise value can be obtained only if the return on bank liabilities is sufficiently low, which imposes a cost on those who hold these liabilities for transaction purposes. If the banking system is monopolistic, then an efficient allocation is incentive feasible. In this case, the members of the banking system obtain a higher return on assets, making it feasible to pay a sufficiently high return on bank liabilities. Finally, we argue that the regulation of the banking system is required to obtain efficiency.

The Swiss financial centre, as it developed during the twentieth century, has for a long time been presented and perceived as a singularly stable and solid environment escaping crises and restructuring. This view, promoted by the dominant actors – private banks, cantonal banks and large commercial banks – presenting their own development, in a teleological vision, as success stories, is strongly challenged by more recent research developments. Our article deals with the evolution of banking demography in Switzerland between 1850 and 2000 and examines the exits of banking institutions from the statistics, identifying six periods of crisis and restructuring. The article proposes a new statistical series that makes it possible to scrutinise with a high level of granularity the banks that fail or are taken over, in particular by observing their category of bank and, for the period 1934–99, their size. It uses historical banking demography as a gateway to understand more broadly the phases of transformation of the financial centre. In doing so, this contribution questions the gap between the existence of significant phases of banking instability, their low importance in collective memory, and the perception of the Swiss banking sector as a model of stability. It also helps to refine our understanding of the evolution of the Swiss financial centre in general.

A century ago the US commercial banking system was exceptional in two ways. It was by good measure the largest commercial banking system of any country. And it was different from the commercial banking systems of other leading countries in having tens of thousands of independent banks with very few branches rather than the more typical pattern of a far smaller number of banks with many branches. Today, a century later, the US system is more normal than exceptional, dominated by a small number of very large banks with extensive branch systems. This article describes the US banking-structure transition from exceptional to normal. It closes with an interesting contrast of US and European banking developments.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of economic development on the influence of country-level determinants on corporate debt maturity, bearing in mind firm size and the period of financial crisis.Design/methodology/approachThe authors employ panel data estimation with fixed effects to examine the role of economic development in influencing the relationship between country-level determinants on corporate debt maturity. The paper uses a sample of 30,727 listed firms, belonging to 39 countries, over the period 2005–2012.FindingsCorporate debt maturity increases with the efficiency of the legal system and bank concentration and decreases with the weight of banks in the economy. However, the importance of these country determinants is greater in developing than in developed countries. The authors also show that firm size in developed and developing countries influences country determinants of corporate debt maturity. Finally, the results reveal that the financial crisis has affected the debt maturity of firms differently in developed and developing countries, with the effect of bank concentration lengthening debt maturity, this effect being more pronounced in developing countries.Practical implicationsThe findings provide useful insights to guide policy decisions providing access to long-term financing, as corporate debt maturity depends on economic development, institutional environment, banking structure and firm size.Originality/valueThis study incorporates economic development in explaining the relationship between country-level determinants and corporate debt maturity.

This paper analyzes how bank efficiency and political economy variables influence bank-market structure in 69 countries. Results for more than 2,500 banks over the 1996-2002 period indicate that the ability of the efficiency-structure hypothesis to explain bank-market structure varies across countries, depending on national political economy variables. Increased market monitoring and a better-quality contracting environment amplify the positive influence of bank efficiency on market share and market concentration. Stricter bank entry requirements and more generous deposit insurance schemes, however, mitigate the influence of bank efficiency on market share and market concentration.

In a response to the financial collapse of 2007-2009, central banks overstepped their narrow role of lender of last resort (LLR) and acted as dealers or market-makers of last resort (MMLR). Such an evolution of the central bank policy stems from the endogenous process of growing securities markets, financial innovations, and market-based credit intermediation. This article examines how changes in the structure of the banking and financial system transforms the central bank policy in financial stability. It considers the separation or integration of the LLR and MMLR functions, revisits the debate opposing lend-to-market and lend-to-institution theses, and discusses the LLR standard rule and its transposition to the MMLR rule. Inasmuch as private securities markets and financial innovations determine the structure of the credit system, central banks endogenously adopt the integrated approach, so that the extensive LLR policy prevails.