The process of financial liberalization has stiffened competition in an environment characterized by a revolution in information technology and provided an incentive for bank management to focus on improving efficiency. To date, limited studies were conducted for Middle East banking sectors, a...

China has recently taken substantial steps to reform its banking sector, particularly after joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2001. This study examines the effect of recent banking reforms and WTO accession on the cost efficiency of Chinese banking and the efficiency...

We assess the impact of accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and stock ownership deregulation on the presence of anomalies in stock returns in China. We partition our data into sub-periods that mirror WTO accession and Investor-Base Expansion (IBE) in all share markets. Unlike prior...

What is the influence of the banking environment on bank syndicate structure? We provide empirical evidence on this issue by examining the influence of several banking environment characteristics, including the structure of the banking market, financial development, banking regulation and...

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...

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...

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...