There is a long-standing debate about the special nature of banks. Based on a unique dataset of legislative changes in industrial countries, we identify events that strengthen competition policy, analyze their impact on banks and non-financial firms and explain the reactions observed with...

The nexus between ownership and competition in the banking sector is a major concern to policymakers around the world but one that is rarely comprehensively examined. For 131 countries and 13 years we match bank ownership with over 50,000 bank-year estimates of individual bank market power. We...

External imbalances played a pivotal role in the run-up to the global financial crisis, being an important underlying cause of the ensuing turmoil. While current account (flow) imbalances have narrowed in the aftermath of the crisis, net international investment position (stock) imbalances still...

This paper provides the first empirical evidence on how home-country regulation and supervision affects bank risk-taking in host-country markets. We analyze lending by 136 banks to 8,253 firms in 1,513 different localities across 13 countries. We find strong evidence that laxer regulatory...

This paper provides evidence on the strategic lending decisions made by banks facing a negative funding shock. Using bank-firm level credit data, we show that banks reallocate credit within their loan portfolio in at least three different ways. First, banks reallocate to sectors where they have...

This paper provides evidence on how the new international regulation on Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs) impacts the market value of large banks. We analyze the stock price reactions for the 300 largest banks from 52 countries across 12 relevant regulatory announcement and...

We examine how U.S. monetary policy affects the international activities of U.S. Banks. We access a rarely studied US bank-level dataset to assess at a quarterly frequency how changes in the U.S. Federal funds rate (before the crisis) and quantitative easing (after the onset of the crisis)...

Does democratization reduce the cost of credit? Using global syndicated loan data from 1984 to 2014, we find that democratization has a sizeable negative effect on loan spreads: a one-point increase in the zero-to-ten Polity IV index of democracy shaves at least 19 basis points off spreads, but...

We ask whether access to the internet increases participation in a workfare program in Indian villages, especially during a crisis. We exploit the exodus of migrant workers from cities to rural areas during the pandemic and phase-wise rollout of the internet for identification. Comparing...

This paper provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical analysis of "creditor rights" and "information sharing" throughout over 1.8 million public and private firms in Europe. We show that many of the outcomes associated with greater levels of creditor rights can be obtained with higher...