This note demonstrates how performance measure congruity and noise determine an agency’s total surplus within an linear agency framework with multiple tasks. It provides a decomposition of agency costs, leading back to a congruity index previously proposed in the literature. In addition,...

Policy makers often decide to liberalize foreign bank entry but at the same time restrict the mode of entry. We study how different entry modes affect the interest rate for loans in a model in which domestic banks possess private information about their incumbent clients but foreign banks have...

The current economic policy discussion on financial integration in the European Union concentrates on cross-border mergers. We study the impact of cross-border lending in a theoretical model where banks acquire either hard or soft information on borrowing firms and predict that the closer firms...

The effects of bank competition and institutions on credit markets are usually studied separately although both factors are interdependent. We study the effect of bank competition on the choice of contracts (screening versus collateralized credit contract) and explicitly capture the impact of...

This paper investigates the role of variance analysis procedures in aligning objectives under the condition of distorted performance measurement. A riskneutral agency with linear contracts is analyzed, whereby the agent receives postcontract, pre-decision information on his productivity. If the...

We develop a double moral hazard model that predicts that the use of project finance increases with both the political risk of the country in which the project is located and the influence of the lender over this political risk exposure. In contrast, the use of project finance should decrease as...

Credit markets in many Eastern European countries are now dominated by foreign-owned banks. We analyze the development for foreign ownership and its impact on lending rate in ten Eastern European countries between 1995 and 2003. Currently, the majority of loans from foreign banks is granted by...

Business groups in emerging markets perform better than unaffiliated firms. One explanation is that business groups substitute some functions of missing institutions, for example, enforcing contracts. We investigate this by setting up a model where firms within the business group are connected...

It has been argued that competing banks make inefficiently frequent use of collateralization in situations where they are better able to evaluate a project’s risk than entrepreneurs. We study the bank’s choice between screening and collateralization in a model where banks do not...

This paper analyzes the use of alternative performance measures in an agency model in which contracting incorporates both formal and informal agreements. It is shown that under a proper use of verifiable and unverifiable performance measures, the two types of contracts are complements,...