This paper investigates to what extent risk management and corporate governance mitigate the involvement of banks in credit boom and bust cycles. Using a unique, handcollected dataset on 156 banks from Central and Eastern Europe during 2005-2012, we assess whether banks with stronger risk...

This paper investigates to what extent risk management and corporate governance mitigate the involvement of banks in credit boom and bust cycles. Using a unique, hand-collected dataset on 156 banks from Central and Eastern Europe during 2005-2012, we assess whether banks with stronger risk...

We model how an information asymmetry between the lending bank and the applying firm about the currency structure of firm revenues may affect loan currency choice. Our framework features a trade-off between the lower cost of foreign currency debt and the costs of currency induced loan default....

We study the impact of pre-contractual communication on market outcomes when economic relationships are subject to hidden action. Our experiment is framed in a credit market context and borrowers (second movers) can communicate with lenders (first movers) prior to entering the credit...

We employ a unique dataset of credit assessments for 3,756 small businesses by nine banks using an identical rating model to examine (i) to what extent loan officers use their discretion to smooth credit ratings of their clients, and (ii) to assess whether this use of discretion is driven by...

Relational contracts have been shown to mitigate moral hazard in labor and credit markets. A central assumption in most theoretical and experimental studies is that, upon misbehaving, agents can be excluded from their current source of income and have to resort to less attractive outside...

We exploit variation in consumer price inflation across 71 Russian regions to examine the relationship between the perceived stability of the local currency and financial dollarization. Our results show that regions with higher inflation experience an increase in the dollarization of household...

This paper examines the impact of credit reporting on the repayment behavior of borrowers. We implement an experimental credit market in which loan repayment is not third-party enforceable. We then compare market outcome with a public credit registry to that without a credit registry. This...

We examine the impact of banking sector reforms on interest rates using bank-level data from Kyrgyzstan for 1998-2005. We find that increased confidence in the banking sector has contributed significantly to lowering interest rate levels, while the impact of lower intermediation costs, credit...

We examine the firm- and country-level determinants of the currency denomination of small business loans. We first model the choice of loan currency in a framework which features a trade-off between lower cost of debt and the risk of firm-level distress costs, and also examines the impact of...