Competitive shocks can erode the customer base and thus the information pool of banks. Inferiorinformation quality also reduces the quality of borrowers and may lead to financial instability ofbanks and corporates if risk taking is excessive. Recent theories conjecture that banks can mitigatethe...

Information management is a core process in banking, in particular when lending to small, opaquefirms. But while a more intensive use of information technology (IT) can enhance informationmanagement, it is also costly. Merely increasing IT expenditure may thus not be a panacea tooptimize...

Syndicated loan data provided by DealScan is an essential input in banking research. This data is rich enough to answer urging questions on bank lending, e.g., in the presence of financial shocks or climate change. However, many data options raise the question of how to choose the estimation...

This paper shows that local banking market conditions affect mortality rates in the United States. Exploiting the staggered relaxation of branching restrictions in the 1990s across states, we find that banking deregulation decreases local mortality rates. This effect is driven by a decrease in...

Financial constraints are frictions that prevent firms from funding all desired investments, which might affect firm value and aggregate economic activity. We investigate whether and how bank governance, especially private vs. non-private bank ownership, affects financial constraints of small...

We test how bank market power influences technical change and resource allocation of informationally opaque firms. We use a dataset with approximately 700,000 firm-year observations of German small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) to identify the effect of bank market power using the...

This paper investigates the impact of IT standardization on bank performance based on a panel of 457 German savings banks over the period from 1996 to 2006. We measure IT standardization as the fraction of IT expenses for centralized services over banks' total IT expenses. Bank efficiency, in...

This paper tests whether an increase in insured deposits causes banks to become more risky. We use variation introduced by the U.S. Emergency Economic Stabilization Act in October 2008, which increased the deposit insurance coverage from $100,000 to $250,000 per depositor and bank. For some...

Motivated by the variety of bank risk proxies, our analysis reveals that nonperforming assets are a well-suited complement to the Z-score in studies of bank risk.

In the wake of the recent financial crisis, significant regulatory actions have been taken aimed at limiting risks emanating from trading in bank business models. Prominent reform proposals are the Volcker Rule in the U.S., the Vickers Report in the UK, and, based on the Liikanen proposal, the...