declines in lending standards by incumbent banks. Finally, lending standards declined more in areas with higher mortgage …

The paper relies on a firm-level data on transition economies to examine the relationship between informality and bank … credit. We find evidence that informality is robustly and significantly associated with lower access to and use of bank … credit. We also find that higher tax compliance costs reduce firms' reliance on bank credit, while a stronger quality of the …

'Afrique Centrale (CEMAC) and the level of bank competition at the regional level. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative … excess liquidity in the region. Other data also indicate that bank competition within the CEMAC as a region is limited …

This paper examines the behavior of bank soundness indicators during episodes of brisk loan growth, using bank …-level data for central and eastern Europe and controlling for the feedback effect of credit growth on bank soundness. No evidence … is found that rapid loan expansion has weakened banks during the last decade, but over time weaker banks seem to have …

are experiencing credit booms. This paper analyzes the role of foreign-owned banks in these credit booms. The results show … that the CEE countries depend on foreign banks, and these foreign banks depend on interbank funding. Lending by foreign … banks seems driven by economic growth and interest rate margins. This lending appears independent of economic but not …

As in other sectors, competition in finance matters for allocative, productive and dynamic efficiency. Theory suggests …, however, that unfettered competition is not first best given the special features of finance. I review these analytics and … describe how to assess the degree of competition in markets for financial services. Existing research shows that the degree of …

banks can extract market power rents. We show that more bank competition results in lower economy-wide risk, lower bank … capital ratios, more efficient production plans and Pareto-ranked real allocations. Perfect competition supports a second best … allocation and optimal levels of bank risk and capitalization. These results are at variance with those obtained by a large …

-to-assets ratio is ambiguous. Similarly, as competition increases, the probability of bank failure can either increase or decrease. We …We study a banking model in which banks invest in a riskless asset and compete in both deposit and risky loan markets …. The model predicts that as competition increases, both loans and assets increase; however, the effect on the loans …

costs associated with bank defaults. The distance-to-default, a widely used market-based measure of corporate default risk …