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...

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...

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...

We examine how asymmetric information and competition in the credit market affect voluntary information sharing between lenders. We study an experimental credit market in which information sharing can help lenders to distinguish good borrowers from bad ones, ecause borrowers may exogenously...

We investigate whether information sharing among banks has affected credit market performance in the transition countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, using a large sample of firm-level data. Our estimates show that information sharing is associated with improved availability...

Based on survey data covering 8,387 firms in 20 countries we compare credit demand and credit supply for firms in Eastern Europe to those for firms in selected Western European countries. We find that, while 30% of firms do not need credit in Eastern Europe, their need for credit is higher than...

Motivated by concerns over foreign currency exposures of banks in Emerging Europe, we examine the currency denomination of business loans made in Bulgaria during the period 2003-2007. We analyze a unique dataset including information on the requested and granted currency for more than hundred...