This valuable book discusses in detail, through a blend of theory and empirical research, the processes of innovation and the diffusion of new financial instruments.

On May 11-12, 2011, SUERF, the Belgian Financial Forum, the Brussels Finance Institute and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) jointly organised the 29th SUERF Colloquium New paradigms in money and finance? The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the...

This paper examines the effects of group identity in the credit market. Exploiting the quasirandom assignment of first-time borrowers to loan officers of a large Albanian lender, we test for own-gender bias in the loan officer-borrower match. We find that borrowers pay on average 29 basis points...

Abstract: We exploit the quasi-random assignment of borrowers to loan officers using data from a large Albanian lender to show that own-gender preferences affect both credit supply and demand. Borrowers matched to officers of the opposite gender are less likely to return for a second loan. The...

We analyze gender differences associated with loan officer performance. Using a unique data set for a commercial bank in Albania over the period 1996 to 2006, we find that loans screened and monitored by female loan officers show statistically and economically significant lower default rates...

This paper investigates whether the stock market reacts to unsolicited ratings for a sample of firms rated by Samp;P between January 1996 and December 2005. We first analyze the stock market reaction to the assignment of an initial unsolicited rating. We find evidence that this reaction is...

We examine the effect which credit risk transfer (CRT) markets have on real sector productivity and the volume of financial intermediation in an economy. We find that, despite a reduction in per-firm monitoring, CRT increases productivity in the up-market segment of the real sector but decreases...

This paper examines why unsolicited ratings tend to be lower than solicited ratings. Both self-selection among issuers and strategic conservatism of rating agencies may be reasonable explanations. Analyses of default incidences of non-U.S. borrowers between January 1996 and December 2006 show...

This paper discusses the effect of capital regulation on the risk taking behavior of commercial banks. We first theoretically show that capital regulation works differently in different market structures of banking sectors. In lowly concentrated markets, capital regulation is effective in...

In this paper we investigate the implications of providing loan officers with a compensation structure that rewards loan volume and penalizes poor performance versus a fixed wage unrelated to performance. We study detailed transaction information for more than 45,000 loans issued by 240 loan...