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...

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...