We study whether and to what extent financial exchange innovations are in practice patentable in Europe. We find that exchange-related applications initially increased significantly after the State Street decision but subsequently decreased. The clear majority (65%) of applications come from the...

Using a sample of U.S. mergers and acquisitions, this study evaluates how banking relationships influence acquirers’ choice of financial advisors. Specifically, it examines: i) acquirers’ previous relationships with advisors in various financial activities: M&A advisories, equity issuings...

We study the effects of investor protection on the availability of external finance, entrepreneurship, and creation of new firms in an equilibrium search model of private capital markets. In addition to search frictions, we examine contract frictions, specifically interim and ex post moral...

The paper constructs a search-theoretic model of credit markets with a bilateral trading mechanism that enables the manageable introduction of asymmetric information. Borrowers´ success probabilities are unobservable to financiers, but the degree of risk in observable projects can be used as a...

This paper studies relationship lending in a framework where the cost of switching banks measures the degree of banking competition. The relationship lender’s (insider bank’s) informational advantage creates a lock-in effect, which is at its height when the switching cost is infinitesimal....

This paper studies how comparing can be used to provide information in financial markets in the presence of a hidden characteristics problem. Although an investor cannot precisely estimate the future returns of an entrepreneur’s projects, the investor can mitigate the asymmetric information...

Although it is widely acknowledged that the benefits of corporate governance reform could be substantial, systematic evidence on such reforms is scant. We both document and evaluate a contemporary corporate governance reform by constructing 18 measures of shareholder and creditor protection for...

In this paper, by employing a novel approach, we study the relationship between bank type and small-business lending in a post-transition country. Using a unique dataset on bank branches and firm-level data, we find that local cooperative banks lend more to small businesses than do large...

This theoretical paper explores screening with loan collateral when both the collateral value and the probability of project success fluctuate. Some model versions challenge the classic findings of Bester (1985) by showing that high-risk borrowers may in such case be more willing to pledge...

Consider a competitive bank whose illiquid asset portfolio is funded by short-term debt that has to be refinanced before the asset matures. We show that in this setting maximal transparency is not socially optimal, and that the existence of social externalities of bank failures further lowers...