How do banks react to increased interbank competition?Recent banking theory offers conflicting predictions about the impact of competition on bank orientation í L H WKH choice of relationship based versus transactional banking í DQG EDQN LQGXVWU\ specialization.We empirically investigate the...

A recent string of theoretical papers highlights the importance of geographical distance in explaining pricing and availability of loans to small firms.Lenders located in the vicinity of small firms have significantly lower monitoring and transaction costs, and hence considerable market power if...

Credit contracts are non-exclusive. A string of theoretical papers shows that nonexclusivity generates important negative contractual externalities. Employing a unique dataset, we identify how the contractual externality stemming from the non-exclusivity of credit contracts affects credit...

We provide the first evidence on how the introduction of information sharing via a public credit registry affects banks’ lending decisions. We employ a unique dataset containing detailed information on credit card applications and decisions from one of the leading banks in China. While we do...

Recent theoretical models argue that a bank's organizational structure reflects its lending technology.A hierarchically organized bank will employ mainly hard information, whereas a decentralized bank will rely more on soft information.We investigate theoretically and empirically how bank...

We employ a unique data set containing bank-specific information to explore how foreign bank entry determines credit allocation in emerging markets. We investigate the impact of the mode of foreign entry (greenfield or takeover) on banks’ portfolio allocation to borrowers with different...

When new technologies become available, it is not only essential that firms have the correct investment incentives, but often also that consumers make the proper usage decisions. This paper studies investment and usage in a shared ATM network. Be- cause all banks coordinate their ATM investment...

Abstract: 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...

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...

Using a novel way to identify relationship and transaction banks, we study how banks’ lending techniques affect funding to SMEs over the business cycle. For 21 countries we link the lending techniques that banks use in the direct vicinity of firms to these firms’ credit constraints at two...