A sound financial regulatory framework is critical for minimizing the risk imposed by financial system fra­gility. In the world's emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs), such regulation is also essential to support economic development and poverty reduc­tion. Meanwhile, it is...

Exploiting geographic variation in the exposure of U.S. banks to COVID-19 and lockdown policies we find that banks more exposed to pandemic and lockdown policies show an increase in loss provisions and non-performing loans. While we observe an increase in corporate, especially small business,...

This paper studies the effects of own-gender preferences on the supply of and demand for credit using data from a large Albanian lender. We document that first-time borrowers assigned to officers of the opposite sex are less likely to return for a second loan. The effect is larger when officers...

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...