A large body of literature has shown that small firms, due to their opaqueness, may find it difficult to access the credit market. Informational asymmetries may be mitigated by posting collateral or by building relationships with lenders (relationship lending). However, in some cases, due to a...

Loan refusal has been a problem facing many loan applicants at the household level and this problem is not new to loan applicants in Ghana. Despite this knowledge, researchers passively discuss loan refusal and do not consider the intensity of this problem. This study analyses the effect of...

This paper provides a unified analysis for the onset of the 1998 financial crisis and the strong economic recovery afterward in Russia and other former Soviet Union countries. Before the crisis a banking failure arose owing to the coexistence of a lemons credit market and high government...

In a two period overlapping generations economy with asymmetric information, we investigate the interaction between credit market development and human capital accumulation. As is typical, young borrowers supply their endowed unit of labor time to earn wage income which is used as internal...

In this paper we investigate whether or not mutual guarantee consortia (MGC), a financial institution well developed in Italy, alleviate the difficulties that Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) face when they ask for a bank loan. We find that the probability of a small firm affiliated to a MGC...

This paper provides a unified theory to explain the onset of the financial crisis in 1998 and the striking economic recovery in Russia and the former Soviet Union afterwards. Before the crisis, the banking sector in these economies was stuck in a development trap in which the banking sector is...

This paper highlights the importance of the information efficiency in the banking sector as a way to ensure his correct operation as financial intermediary and the correct functioning of the economy in general. The problems of information in the banks distort their relation with the financing...

We consider the problem of consistently pricing new options given the prices of related options on the same stock. The Black-Scholes formula and standard binomial trees can only accommodate one related European option which then effectively specifies the volatility parameter. Implied binomial...

While theoretical models strongly suggest that short-sales are mainly driven by private information, recent empirical evidence of has been rather mixed. This paper contributes to the discussion by looking at various potential motives to sell short and compares these with regular buys and sales...

The world market of crude oil has three well established benchmarks used for pricing of other crudes: West Texas Intermediate, Europe Brent and Dubai Fateh. The relevance of these are however declining, as the output of the benchmarks is decreasing, and as an increasing share of world crude...