This paper studies the determinants of net interest margins of banks (NIMs) in four South Asian countries (Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan) in the period 1997-2012 using panel data of 230 banks. The study is in line of Ho-Saunders (1981) dealership model and its later expansions but extended the model by adding new variable the relative size of the banks and also classifying the determinants of interest margins as bank specific, industry specific and macroeconomic specific variables. We found that liquidity and equity positions, required reserve and operating expenses to total asset ratios affect net interest margins positively while relative size of the banks, market power and economic growth affect inversely. JEL classification: G21, C23

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How important are collateral constraints for reproducing salient features of the data? To address this question, we estimate two nested versions of a New Keynesian model: one with collateralized household debt and the frictionless version of the same model. Both versions of the model are fit to Canadian data using Bayesian methods. We argue that the presence of collateral constraints improves the performance of the model in terms of overall goodness of fit. Housing collateral helps to generate a positive correlation between consumption and house prices. Moreover, housing collateral induced spillovers boosted consumption growth during the housing market boom‐bust cycles of the late 1980s and early 2000s.

This paper provides an insight into the behaviour of the liability side of bank balance sheet in response to explicit deposit insurance. It is an empirical investigation into the choice of a rational bank maximizing its bank value in terms of deposit and non-deposit liabilities after the implementation of explicit deposit insurance. The paper tests how banks' liabilities are affected because of the safety net and its design. Banks lower their leverage ratio as a response to the explicit deposit insurance. The paper finds evidence of depositor shifting funds between the types of deposits in the bank as a result of the explicit deposit insurance. It provides evidence of the importance of setting the right coverage in order to prevent the adverse effects that deposit insurance induces. It studies how the safety net design features affect the bank liability structure. The study finds that besides the explicit deposit insurance, the bank liability structure is affected by factors like tax expense, bank size, overheads, and dividend payout.

This paper addresses the empirical dilemma in identifying and estimating the parameters governing the intertemporal elasticity of substitution (IES) for import demand. We propose a new concept, the cross-Euler equation, for overcoming this empirical dilemma. IES parameters are estimated by exploiting the cointegrating restriction implied by the cross-Euler equation. Further, by comparing the IES estimates from the cross-Euler equation to those from the standard Euler equation, we test the hypothesis whether import demand is affected by nuisance factors. Using the US data, we found imported goods consumption to be robust against nuisance factors, but not for domestic goods. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.