This article evaluates whether financial intermediary development explains cross-country differences in macroeconomic efficiency. Stochastic frontier approach is applied at the aggregate level to estimate efficiency on a panel of 41 countries for the period 1991 to 1995. Generalized Method of...

This article investigates the impact of legal environment on the relationship between leverage and auditor choice in 10 European countries. We demonstrate that the relationship between the choice of a high-quality auditor and firm leverage varies significantly across countries. This finding...

This study investigates the motive of geographic risk diversification in the lending activity for bank mergers in the EU on a sample of large banking groups. Geographic diversification should allow banks to reduce their risk. It is observed that the loan portfolios of European banks are...

Following the common use of collateral in SME lending, this article aims attesting empirically the three major theoretical reasons for using collateral: reduction of loan loss in the event of default, adverse selection and moral hazard. We use a unique dataset of 735 bank loans granted to French...