This working paper by CGD non-resident fellow Dean Karlan explores whether group liability in lending practices improves lender's overall profitability and the poor's access to financial markets. Group liability is a common microcredit lending mechanism that makes a group, rather than an...

Borrowers' reputation concerns makes communication of soft or non-verifiable information credible. We find that some misreporting of short-term information has costs as well as benefits. The costs are due to inefficient management of investments, while the benefits are due to the fact that some...

This paper analyzes central bank policies on the monitoring of banks in distress in which liquidity provisions are conditional on performance when a bad shock occurs. A sequential game model is used to analyze two policies: the first one in which the central bank acts with discretion and the...

This paper uses stochastic frontier analysis and Tobit regressions to provide international evidence on the impact of regulatory, supervision and environmental factors on bank efficiency. Our contribution is twofold. First, we use a newly constructed database of 3,086 observations from 677...

Understanding firm constraints in Ramp;D expenditures is a key component to addressing broader economic goals. We investigate the role of local intensity of university-industry knowledge spillovers on the amount of firm Ramp;D expenditure. To investigate this issue we use firm-level dataon...

This paper explores the interest rate transmission mechanism on the basis of a large disaggregated sample of British monthly deposit and loan rates 1993-2005 for seven key products. The focus is on the adjustment speed towards the long run equilibrium rate. A sizeable proportion of UK deposits...

Understanding why some firms default, while others do not, is an important issue for the assessment of financial stability. In this domain, it may be interesting to understand if credit risk is driven mostly by idiosyncratic firm characteristics or by systematic factors, which simultaneously...

We introduce a framework that analyzes the interplay of credit risk and collateral market risk on loan pricing. That for, we decompose any loan in unsecured and secured part. We further consider explicitly the recovery process. The framework allows us to develop semi-analytical pricing formulas...

We study the effect of bank loan announcements on the borrowing firms' bond and equity prices. Our sample consists of 896 loan deals signed between 1997 to 2003 involving 364 different U.S. firms. We report the first comprehensive evidence that also firm bond prices react to bank loan...

Risk capital is the contribution of an exposure to the default risk of a financial institution. We investigate its relationship with required shareholder returns, showing that the use of return on risk capital (RAROC) as a risk-adjusted performance measure is inconsistent with the standard...