This book provides a compendium to the empirical work investigating the hypotheses generated by recent banking theory. Such a compendium is overdue. Since the publication of the The Microeconomics of Banking by Xavier Freixas and Jean Charles Rochet, work in empirical banking has further...

Loan rates for seemingly identical borrowers often exhibit substantial dispersion. This paper investigates the determinants of the dispersion in interest rates on loans granted by banks to small and medium sized enterprises. We associate this dispersion with the loan officers' use of...

How do banks react to increased interbank competition? Recent banking theory offers conflicting predictions about the impact of competition on bank orientation - i.e., the choice of relationship based versus transactional banking - and bank industry specialization. We empirically investigate the...

This impressive Handbook presents the quantitative techniques that are commonly employed in empirical finance research together with real-world, state-of-the-art research examples.

This book provides an insightful view of major issues in the economics of corporate governance (CG) and mergers. It presents a systematic update on the developments in the two fields during the last decade, as well as highlighting the neglected topics in CG research, such as the role of boards,...

The recent financial crisis has reopened the debate on the impact of informal and formal finance on firm growth in developing countries. Using unique survey data, we find that informal finance is associated with higher sales growth for small firms and lower sales growth for large firms. We...

We propose a heteroscedastic regression model to identify the determinants of the dispersion in interest rates on loans granted to small and medium sized enterprises. We interpret unexplained deviations as evidence of the banks' discretionary use of market power in the loan rate setting process....