The intermediation approach considers banks’ liabilities as inputs to produce loans and other banking assets. We show that measures of banking efficiency and productivity are biased when there is an incomplete coverage of assets and liabilities. The bias can be eliminated with a complete...

We sketch a theoretical framework for comparing the properties of funded LOLR schemes. We construct an idealized lender of last resort and investigate how it formulates policy under alternative public and private governance structures. The alternatives are a (first-best) social utility maximizer...

Credit channel as a channel of influence of financial factors on the real economy has been an intensive subject of both theoretical and empirical research during the last twenty years. Leena Morttinen's doctoral dissertation deals with several topics in this area. The first essay studies the...

Sans chercher a dresser une mise en perspective complete de l'histoire du credit au XVIIe siecle, qui n'est pas le but de cet article, nous voudrions ici simplement interroger le prejuge lie au credit et a son corollaire, l'endettement.

In the course of ordinary business, commercial banks frequently encounter entrepreneurs seeking loans for the purpose of financing new or continuing projects. These entrepreneurs are frequently unrealistic, their perception having been biased by wishful thinking. Bankers are left with a...

This study provides an empirical assessment of the efficiency and interest rate changes occurring during 61 UK retail bank mergers. Key findings of the work include the general efficiency enhancing influence of UK bank mergers and the limited effect of merger on retail interest rates....

In applications as diverse as banking, supermarket and catalogue sales, it has been clearly identified that prices have a strong propensity to cluster around certain digits. This study forwards an explanation and empirical investigation of price clustering in retail markets, through an...

This paper analyses the impact of the transition from price-cap regulation (deposit/loan rate control) to rate-of-return regulation (ROA, NP:s and/or BIS ratio) on banking industry structure. A simple theoretical model of banking competition suggests that the relative dominance of the two...

Firms face the problem of choosing a debt maturity structure when financing an investment project. In addition, they have to decide which financing source to take. The aim of this article is firstly to give an explanation for the differing maturity choices by firms. As is shown below, the...

One of the more dramatic financial events of the late 1980s and early 1990s was the surge in Japanese stock prices that was immediately followed by a very sharp decline of more than 50 percent. While the unprecedented fluctuations in Japanese stock prices were domestic financial shocks, the...