Loyal Lenders or Fickle Financiers: Foreign Banks in Latin America

We suggest that foreign banks may represent a trade-off for their developing country hosts. A portfolio model is developed to show that a more diversified international bank may be one of lower, overall risk and less susceptible to funding shocks but may react more to shocks that affect expected returns in a particular host country. Foreign banks have become particularly important in Latin America where we find strong support for these theoretical predictions using a dataset of individual Latin American banks in 11 countries. Moreover, we find no significant difference between the size of the response of foreign banks to a negative liquidity shock and a positive opportunity shock: in both cases the market share of foreign banks in credit increases.

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Inter-American Development Bank
Other Authors: Arturo Galindo
Format: Working Papers biblioteca
Language:English
Published: Inter-American Development Bank
Subjects:Financial Sector, WP-529,
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.18235/0010962
https://publications.iadb.org/en/loyal-lenders-or-fickle-financiers-foreign-banks-latin-america
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Summary:We suggest that foreign banks may represent a trade-off for their developing country hosts. A portfolio model is developed to show that a more diversified international bank may be one of lower, overall risk and less susceptible to funding shocks but may react more to shocks that affect expected returns in a particular host country. Foreign banks have become particularly important in Latin America where we find strong support for these theoretical predictions using a dataset of individual Latin American banks in 11 countries. Moreover, we find no significant difference between the size of the response of foreign banks to a negative liquidity shock and a positive opportunity shock: in both cases the market share of foreign banks in credit increases.