The paper aims at investigating on the credit conditions experienced by Italian firms during the recent business cycle. In doing so, we use a novel dataset on firms’ opinions derived from the ISTAT Business Confidence surveys. The dataset allows us to add to existing literature in three...

Why do banks squeeze their lending activity? is an oft-repeated question during the times of financial crisis. This study examines an emerging economy’s banking system and contributes to the evolving body of literature on the topic by providing answers as to what causes the sluggish bank...

This paper concerns the problem of corporate credit in Poland and tries to determine the sources of banks’ unexpected hesitance to provide enterprises with additional liquidity, which was observed during the global financial crisis. It differentiates between fundamental and non-fundamental...

Interchange fees in card payments are a mechanism to balance costs and revenues between banks for the joint provision of payment services. However, such fees represent a relevant input cost used as a reference price for the final fee charged to the merchants, who may be reluctant to accept cards...

Every crisis should teach us a valuable lesson. However, it seems that we learn almost nothing since they still occur from time to time strongly affecting the world economies. The basic question from where we started our research and to which we tried to answer as clearly as possible is the...

Using different credit measures, this study identifies the credit booms in Turkey that have occurred after December 2002, and examines their determinants. We find that the primary factors that have a strong correlation with the probability of a credit boom are the changes in the slope of the...

The main objective of this study is to emphasize the importance of creating special governmental refinancing institutions targeted towards strategic economic sectors. Such institution in Macedonia is Agricultural Credit Discount Fund, a separate unit within the Macedonian Bank for Development...

After Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in September 2008, cross-border bank lending contracted sharply. To explain the severity and variation in this contraction, we analyze detailed data on cross-border syndicated lending by 75 banks to 59 countries. We find that banks that had to write...

In this study, we use firm-level data from the 1993 National Survey of Small Business Finances to test the hypothesis that banking consolidation has reduced the availability of credit to small businesses. We find that banks in markets where mergers have occurred are more likely than other banks...

We propose a method for calculating the macroeconomic costs of banking crises that controls for the downward impact of recessions on banking activity. In contrast to earlier research, we estimate the cost of crises based on the size of banking crises. The extent of a crisis is measured using...