While other parts of the new institutional economics (e. g. principal agent theory,transaction cost theory) have already been applied to co-operative researchwith some success, property rights theory has as yet been only rarelyused in this regard. At the same time, the traditional structure of...

Recent theoretical models argue that a bank’s organizational structure reflects its lending technology. A hierarchically organized bank will employ mainly hard information, whereas a decentralized bank will rely more on soft information. We investigate theoretically and empirically how bank...

We propose a heteroscedastic regression model to identify the determinants of the dispersion in interest rates on loans granted to small and medium sized enterprises. We interpret unexplained deviations as evidence of the banks’ discretionary use of market power in the loan rate setting...

How do banks react to increased competition? Recent banking theory offers conflicting predictions about the impact of competition on bank orientation - i.e., the choice of relationship based versus transactional banking - and bank industry specialization. We empirically investigate the impact of...