This paper presents an analysis of the geography of the booming ‘Islamic financial services’ (IFS) sector, which provides a host of financial services based on Islamic religious grounds. The relevance of such an analysis is discussed against the conceptual backdrop of the world city network literature. It is argued that a focus on the globalization of the IFS sector may provide an alternative t...

All reform countries in Central and Eastern Europe require a rapid and comprehensive restructuring of their public pension schemes for macroand microeconomic reasons. The paper argues that pension reform, economic restructuring, and the growth options for these countries are closely related, and that by pursuing a reform which is at least partially directed towards private and funded pensions, ...

The present paper aims to identify the effect of demographic and socio-economic variables on financial literacy and its impact on the use of financial services. For this study, primary data are collected from 400 unorganized sector workers of Paschim Medinipur district, also an economically development lagger in the state of West Bengal of India. The logit regression result shows that the main ...

The direction of causality between financial intermediation and real economic progress has been a source of discussion over long periods of time. Instead of exogenously siding with one particular direction a priori, this paper provides a different treatment on this debate by considering the interaction between financial and real sectors to be not just a question of causality, but an issue of co...

Banking sector is one of the most important factors in development of economy. A strong and healthy banking sector is considered to be a prerequisite for sustainable economic growth. In this study, the aim is to apply Gray Relational Analysis (GRA) to measure and compare financial performances of 10 banks with common stock trading in Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) between the years of 2005–2011....

We propose a model where investors may choose to acquire costly information that identifies good assets and purchase these assets in opaque (OTC) markets. Uninformed investors access an asset pool that has been cream-skimmed by informed investors. When the quality composition of assets for sale is fixed there is too much information acquisition and the financial industry extracts excessive rent...

We develop a growth model with endogenous technological progress in which the financial sector plays an explicit role. Thereby we discuss the role of different financial regimes in the growth process. We contrast a bank-dominated financial system with a market-dominated system. In the first one a financial intermediary (a bank) is able to solve informational problems, however, at a cost. There ...

The housing and credit markets are closely linked. This paper presents VAR evidence that house prices can generate financial and business cycle dynamics. An increase in house prices leads to a boom in mortgage and real estate construction lending. Leverage decreases in the short run before rising at longer-run horizons across households and most financial intermediaries, irrespective of their p...

Although theoretical models make distinct predictions about the relation between financial sector development and income inequality, little empirical research has been conducted to compare their relative explanatory power. We examine the relation between financial intermediary development and income inequality in a panel data set of 91 countries for the period of 1960-95. Our results provide ev...