For many private firms, relationship lending is the only viable form of outside financing. Relationship lending typically relies on intertemporal loan pricing: losses from early years are recovered by information rents in later years, which stem from the lender's private information regarding...

We consider a setting in which insiders have information about income that outside shareholders do not, but property rights ensure that outside shareholders can enforce a fair payout. To avoid intervention, insiders report income consistent with outsiders' expectations based on publicly...

Do religious beliefs affect real economic decisions? We investigate this fundamental question by comparing default rates on conventional and Islamic loans using a comprehensive monthly dataset from Pakistan that follows more than 150,000 loans over the period 2006:04 to 2008:12. We find robust...

An iconic model with high leverage and overvalued collateral assets is used to illustrate the amplification mechanism driving asset prices to ‘overshoot’ equilibrium when an asset bubble bursts - threatening widespread insolvency and what Richard Koo calls a ‘balance sheet recession’....

We consider the debt capacity of a risky asset when debt is being rolled over and there is a liquidation cost in case of default. We show that debt capacity depends on how information about the quality of the asset is revealed. When the information structure is based on “optimistic”...

Bank liquidity is a crucial determinant of the severity of banking crises. In this paper, we consider the effect of fire sales and foreign entry on banks' ex ante choice of liquid asset holdings, and the ex post resolution of crises. In a setting with limited pledgeability of risky cash flows...

We consider an imperfectly competitive loan market in which a local (e.g., relationship) lender has valuable soft, albeit private, information, which gives her a competitive advantage vis-à-vis distant transaction lenders who provide arm’s-length financing based on hard, publicly available...

We study empirically the effect of focus (specialization) versus diversification on the return and the risk of banks using data from 105 Italian banks over the period 1993–99. Specifically, we analyse the trade-offs between (loan portfolio) focus and diversification using a unique data set...

This Paper empirically investigates the impact of distortions in the banking sector on the structure and dynamics of product markets as well as on firm level outcomes. Our analysis suggests that an increase in the efficiency of the banking industry can have first-order effects not only on the...

The paper seeks to explain the huge cross country variation in private pension funding, shaped by historical choice made when universal pension systems were created after the Great Depression. According to Perotti and von Thadden (2006), large inflationary shocks due to war damage devastated...