ABSTRACT
This book uses a detailed data set obtained from Fitch IBCA’s BankScope. The data set covers 13,000 private and public banks throughout the world with more or less standardized reporting data that facilitate comparison across different accounting systems.1 The panel data set, prior to outlier reduction, is fairly extensive covering banks in 46 countries and spanning the years 1996-2005. The set includes the EU-25, the partly overlapping 30 OECD countries and 10 non-overlapping, larger emerging countries (see Table 9.1).2 The data set is unbalanced as for various reasons not all banks are included throughout the entire period. We focus on data from commercial, cooperative and savings banks (on average, 75 percent of all banks in BankScope) and remove all observations pertaining to other types of financial institutions, such as securities houses, medium and long term credit banks, specialized governmental credit institutions, mortgage and central banks. The latter types of institutions may be less dependent on the traditional intermediation function and may have a different financing structure compared to our focus group. In any case, we favor a more homogeneous sample.
