The Review of Finance and Banking

7-18

Authors: Sankharaj Roy

The present study assesses the factors that are significantly related to the use of financial services among the people living in the North-Eastern States of India. This part of the geographical area has a low penetration of banking and financial services as reported in various documents by the regulators. The use of financial services gives a precise picture of the inclusiveness of the financial system. Financial inclusion does not merely mean having a bank account but using that bank account to derive benefits from various financial services. The present study will try to find out the factors acting as impediments towards the use of financial services and affecting the choice of using or not using any such financial services and products. The study is based on the primary data collected using a questionnaire from 1,948 respondents spreading across three states of North East India. Tobit regression analysis is used as the censored regression model to find out the linear relationship between variables affecting the use of financial services. Fitting Tobit regression model, it is found that, the critical factors that are significant towards the use of financial services are financial awareness, economic status of the members, the suitability of financial products, income, education, age of the user and presence of banking correspondents.

31-48

Authors: Nilufer Ozdemir

A majority of commercial banks in the U.S. are affiliated with a bank holding company. They rely on their internal capital markets for satisfying daily liquidity needs. Did these internal capital markets actually help affiliates during the sub-prime mortgage crisis? By implementing the difference-in-difference technique, this paper measures the role of internal markets. Results show that flows between parent institutions and banks, as well as flows among banks affiliated with the same parent were not effective in preventing a decline in lending during the crisis. On the other hand, banks that had access to non-bank affiliate funds continued to lend.

63-78

Authors: Akinlo A. Enisan

Nigerian economy depends mainly on oil. The country produces and exports crude oil and at the same time, imports refined oil as input into domestic production. Consequently, changes in oil price will have a major effect on phenomenon such as unemployment rate. This paper assesses the impacts of changes in oil price on the unemployment rate. Applying the standard linear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach, the result shows that shock to oil price has no significant long-run effect on the rate of unemployment. However, when the non-linear ARDL (NARDL) is applied, the results provide evidence of log-run but asymmetric effects of oil price shocks on the rate of unemployment. This finding suggests that the best way of modelling the unemployment-oil price nexus is NARDL that allows for short-run symmetry with long-run asymmetry.