If monetary policy is to aim at financial stability, how would it change? To analyze this question, this paper develops a general-form model with endogenous bank risk profiles. Policy rates affect both bank incentives to search for yield and the cost of wholesale funding. Financial stability...

This paper examines the effects of group identity in the credit market. Exploiting the quasirandom assignment of first-time borrowers to loan officers of a large Albanian lender, we test for own-gender bias in the loan officer-borrower match. We find that borrowers pay on average 29 basis points...

On May 9, 2010 euro zone countries announced the creation of the European Financial Stability Facility as a response to the sovereign debt crisis. This paper investigates the impact of this announcement on bank share prices, bank CDS spreads and sovereign CDS spreads. The main private...

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...

Abstract: This paper finds that lending by state banks is less procyclical than lending by private banks, especially in countries with good governance. Lending by state banks in high income countries is even countercyclical. On the liability side, state banks expand potentially unstable...

This paper presents evidence of banks using accounting discretion to overstate the value of distressed assets. In particular, we show that the stock market applies far greater discounts to a bank’s real estate loans and mortgage-backed securities than are implicit in the book values of these...

Using a novel way to identify relationship and transaction banks, we study how banks’ lending techniques affect funding to SMEs over the business cycle. For 21 countries we link the lending techniques that banks use in the direct vicinity of firms to these firms’ credit constraints at two...

Abstract: This paper examines how corporate governance and executive compensation affect bank capitalization strategies for an international sample of banks over the 2003-2011 period. ‘Good’ corporate governance, which favors shareholder interests, is found to give rise to lower bank...

We show that competing firms relax overall competition by lowering future barriers to entry.We illustrate our findings in a two-period model with adverse selection where banks strategically commit to disclose borrower information.By doing this, they invite rivals to enter their market.Disclosure...

We examine the impact of lead arrangers’ reputation on the design of loan contracts such as spread and fees charged. Controlling for the non-randomness of the lender-borrower match (self-selection bias), we find that the reputation of top tier arrangers leads to higher spreads, and that top...