We study the determinants of longer-term bank lending to the real economy in Russia. Our empirical results confirm the «development view» of state-controlled banks who display the highest propensity to lend long-term. We control for such variables as cost of funding and the market power in the...

This paper considers the comparative efficiency of public, private, and foreign banks in Rus-sia, a transition economy with several unusual features. We perform stochastic frontier anal-ysis (SFA) of Russian bank-level quarterly data over the period 2005–2013. The method of computation of...

This paper investigates the phenomenon of hidden negative capital (HNC) associated with bank failures and introduces a product mismatch hypothesis to explain the formation of HNC. Given that troubled banks tend to hide negative capital in financial statements from regulators to keep their...

We employ a Bayesian VAR model to estimate the economic effects on the Russian economy from Western financial sanctions imposed in 2014. Sanctions caused a decrease in the amount of out-standing Russian corporate external debt, but it occurred during an episode of falling oil prices. We...

How much do financial sanctions harm the sanctioned economy? We appeal to the case of Russia which provides a valid laboratory to study the effects of sanctions across time because of the three major waves of sanctions being sequentially imposed on the country over the last decade (in 2014,...

This paper investigates the phenomenon of hidden negative capital (HNC) associated with bank failures and introduces a product mismatch hypothesis to explain the formation of HNC. Given that troubled banks tend to hide negative capital in financial statements from regulators to keep their...

This paper investigates the phenomenon of hidden negative capital (HNC) associated with bank failures and introduces a product mismatch hypothesis to explain the formation of HNC. Given that troubled banks tend to hide negative capital in financial statements from regulators to keep their...

This paper investigates the relationship between operating cost efficiency and the loan quality of Russian banks. It tries to answer the question whether it is always beneficial for banks to be highly cost efficient (the “bad management” hypothesis) or whether this higher cost efficiency...

We study the differential impact of exchange rate volatility on cost efficiency and market structure when banks have non-trivial exposures to foreign currency operations. First, we document that cost efficiency estimates are both severely downward biased by 30% on average and generally not rank...