Differences in firm-level productivity explain international activities of non-financial firms quite well. We test whether differences in bank productivity determine international activities of banks. Based on a dataset that allows tracking banks across countries and across different modes of foreign entry, we model the ordered probability of maintaining a commercial presence abroad and the volume of banks’ international assets empirically. Our research has three main findings. First, more productive banks are more likely to enter foreign markets in increasingly complex modes. Second, more productive banks also hold larger volumes of foreign assets. Third, higher risk aversion renders entry less likely, but it increases the volume of foreign activities conditional upon entry.

In 2001, government guarantees for savings banks in Germany were removed following a lawsuit. We use this natural experiment to examine the effect of government guarantees on bank risk-taking. The results suggest that banks whose government guarantee was removed reduced credit risk by cutting off the riskiest borrowers from credit. Using a difference-in-differences approach we show that none of these effects are present in a control group of German banks to whom the guarantee was not applicable. Furthermore, savings banks adjusted their liabilities away from risk-sensitive debt instruments after the removal of the guarantee, while we do not observe this for the control group. We also document that yield spreads of savings banks’ bonds increased significantly right after the announcement of the decision to remove guarantees, while the yield spread of a sample of bonds issued by the control group remained unchanged. The evidence implies that public guarantees may be associated with substantial moral hazard effects.

We analyze the impact of bank internationalization on domestic market power (Lerner index) and risk for German banks. Risk is measured by the official declaration of regulatory authorities that a bank is distressed. We distinguish the volume of foreign assets, the number of foreign countries, and different modes of foreign entry. Our analysis has three main results. First, higher market power is associated with lower risk. Second, holding assets in many countries reduce market power at home, but banks with a higher share of foreign assets exhibit higher market power. Third, bank internationalization is only weakly related to bank risk.

One of the key obstacles to the empirical analysis of capital controls has been the unavailability of a detailed set of indicators for controls that cover a broad set of countries over a range of years. In this paper, we propose a new set of indicators derived from the Annual Reports on Exchange Arrangements and Export Restrictions. Contrary to most earlier attempts to construct control indicators from this source, our set of indices allows one to analyze the control intensity separately for inflow, outflow and repatriation controls. An additional set of indicators features information on the institutional design of controls. At first glance, the data show that the financial crisis caused a surge in capital market restrictions, most notably concerning the derivatives market. This reflex, which is not justified by the scarce empirical evidence on the success of controls, shows the importance of having a valid measure to allow an econometrically sound policy evaluation in this field. The data are available from the author upon request.

This paper uses panel data to show that capital controls have a significant impact on international interest rate differentials. Various types of controls can be distinguished within the data. The analysis shows that the aforementioned effects of capital controls on interest rates are especially strong in the case of capital import controls on portfolio capital; the implementation of these controls has been suggested in the wake of the Asian Crisis to prevent further crises. The results presented herein contradict the hypothesis that capital controls can achieve a restructuring of the maturity of capital inflows without a distortion in international capital allocation.