A bank's interest expenses are found to increase with its degree of internationalization as proxied by its share of foreign liabilities in total liabilities or a Herfindahl index of international liability concentration, especially if the bank is performing badly. Our benchmark estimation...

Using data for 91 large banks from 45 countries, this paper finds few differences in the extent, type, and pricing of SME loans across foreign, private, and government-owned banks, even though different bank ownership types apply different lending technologies and have different organizational...

We model how an information asymmetry between the lending bank and the applying firm about the currency structure of firm revenues may affect loan currency choice. Our framework features a trade-off between the lower cost of foreign currency debt and the costs of currency induced loan default....

Implicit contracts can mitigate moral hazard in labor, credit and product markets. The enforcement mechanism underlying an implicit contract is the threat of exclusion: the Agent fears that he will lose future income if the principal breaks off the relationship. This threat may be very weak in...

This paper examines the implications of bank activity and short-term funding strategies for bank risk and return using an international sample of 1334 banks in 101 countries leading up to the 2007 financial crisis. Expansion into non-interest income generating activities such as trading...

Based on survey data from 193 banks in 20 countries we provide the first bank-level analysis of the determinants of foreign currency (FX) lending in Emerging Europe. We find that FX lending by all banks, regardless of their ownership structure, is strongly determined by the macroeconomic...

We examine how bank funding structure and securitization activities affect the currency denomination of business loans. We analyze a unique dataset that includes information on the requested and granted loan currency for 99,490 loans granted to 57,464 firms by a Bulgarian bank. Our findings...

This note investigates the determinants of leverage usually tested in Western countries on a large sample of manufacturing companies from six transition economies in Central and Eastern Europe in 1998. We observe at that time the significance of tested factors in most countries, with some...

In this paper the authors propose a new approach to the assessment of excessive risk-taking by a banking sector. They use the portfolio approach to assess the optimal risk-return combination of a bank’s portfolio, based on data for 32 categories of loans. It provides a benchmark for the...