This paper offers a possible explanation for the conflicting empirical results in the literature concerning the relation between loan risk and collateral. Specifically, we posit that different economic characteristics or types of collateral pledges may be associated with the empirical dominance...

The literature has documented a positive relationship between the use of credit scoring for small business loans and small business credit availability, broadly defined. However, this literature is hampered by the fact that all of the studies are based on a single 1998 survey of the very largest...

An important theoretical literature motivates collateral as a mechanism that mitigates adverse selection, credit rationing, and other inefficiencies that arise when borrowers hold ex ante private information. There is no clear empirical evidence regarding the central implication of this...

Collateral is a widely used, but not well understood, debt-contracting feature. Two broad strands of theoretical literature explain collateral as arising from the existence of either ex ante private information or ex post incentive problems between borrowers and lenders. However, the extant...

This paper explores how to incorporate banks' capital structure and risk-taking into models of production. In doing so, the paper bridges the gulf between (1) the banking literature that studies moral hazard effects of bank regulation without considering the underlying microeconomics of...

We argue for a shift in the focus of modeling production from the traditional assumptions of profit maximization and cost minimization to a more general assumption of managerial utility maximization that can incorporate risk incentives into the analysis of production and recover value-maximizing...

By eliminating the influence of statistical noise, stochastic frontier techniques permit the estimation of the best-practice value of a firm´s investment opportunities and the magnitude of a firm´s systematic failure to achieve its best-practice market value - a gauge of the magnitude of...

We develop a novel technique to decompose banks' ratio of nonperforming loans to total loans into two components: first, a minimum ratio that represents best-practice lending given the volume and composition of a bank's loans, the average contractual interest rate charged on these loans, and...

We develop a novel technique to decompose banks' ratio of nonperforming loans to total loans into three components: first, a minimum ratio that represents best-practice lending given the volume and composition of a bank's loans, the average contractual interest rate charged on these loans, and...

We consider how size matters for banks in three size groups: banks with assets of less than $ 1 billion (small community banks), banks with assets between $ 1 billion and $ 10 billion (large community banks), and banks with assets between $ 10 billion and $ 50 billion (midsize banks). Community...