Do credit ratings help enforce market discipline on banks? Analyzing a uniquely comprehensive dataset consisting of 1,081 rating change announcements for 154 international financial institutions between January 2004 and December 2015, we find that rating downgrades for internal reasons, such as...

We study how monetary conditions change the supply by banks of mortgage credit to households. We exploit the widespread presence of foreign currency mortgages in Hungary and study this country's comprehensive credit registry. Changes in monetary conditions not only affect the supply of credit in...

We exploit a nation-wide introduction of mandatory disclosure of borrowers' total credit exposures and show that sharing such information increases credit access independent of borrowers' history. Differentiating between borrowers applying to competitor banks and those reapplying to their...

We identify frictions in the market for liquidity as well as bank-specific and market-wide factors that affect the prices that banks pay for liquidity, captured here by borrowing rates in repos with the central bank and benchmarked by the overnight index swap. We have price data at the...

This paper provides evidence on how the new international regulation on Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs) impacts the market value of large banks. We analyze the stock price reactions for the 300 largest banks from 52 countries across 12 relevant regulatory announcement and...

We find that stricter merger control legislation increases abnormal announcement returns of targets in bank mergers by 7 percentage points. Analyzing potential explanations for this result, we document an increase in the pre-merger profitability of targets, a decrease in the size of acquirers...

Does democratization reduce the cost of credit? Using global syndicated loan data from 1984 to 2014, we find that democratization has a sizeable negative effect on loan spreads: a one-point increase in the zero-to-ten Polity IV index of democracy shaves at least 19 basis points off spreads, but...

We study the impact of higher capital requirements on banks' balance sheets and its transmission to the real economy. The 2011 EBA capital exercise is an almost ideal quasi-natural experiment to identify this impact with a difference-in-differences matching estimator. We find that treated banks...

We study the impact of monetary policy on the supply of bank credit when bank lending is also denominated in foreign currencies. Accessing a comprehensive supervisory dataset from Hungary, we find that the supply of bank credit in a foreign currency is less sensitive to changes in domestic...

We study how information sharing between banks influences the geographical clustering of branches. A spatial oligopoly model first explains why branches cluster and how information sharing impacts price competition and equilibrium clustering. With data on 59,333 branches of 676 banks in 22...