A major policy issue is whether troubles in the banking system re ected in the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 have spurred a credit crunch and, if so, how and why its severity has been different across markets and firms. In this paper, we tackle this issue by looking at the...

We study the effects of the interplay between banking deregulation and corporate governance on the lending behavior of savings banks in Spain. The removal of branching barriers that constrained these banks has led to a nationwide expansion, increasing the number of their branches and their...

Previous research suggests that loan officers play a critical role in relationship lending by producing soft information about SMEs. For the first time, we empirically confirm this hypothesis. We also examine whether the role of loan officers differs from small to large banks as predicted by...