the bank.s lending cycle that results in an easing of credit standards. This easing of standards may be compounded by … individual US banks over the period 1980-2000. We employ over 200,000 observations on commercial loan growth measured at the bank …Stylised facts suggest that bank lending behaviour is highly procyclical. We offer a new hypothesis that may help …

We study empirically the effect of focus (specialization) vs. diversification on the return and the risk of banks using …) focus and diversification using a unique data set that is able to identify individual bank loan exposures to different … bank return while endogenously producing riskier loans for all banks in our sample (this effect being most powerful for …