The Eastern enlargement of the European Union (EU) is likely to give a further boost to trade and capital flows, yet empirical evidence on the possible magnitudes is still scarce. This paper uses four different datasets to estimate the determinants of international asset holdings and trade...

Pecking order models of international finance suggest that countries should become less reliant on international bank lending as they develop. Reduced information costs are one of the factors behind this trend towards disintermediation. This paper presents a simple model on the choice between...

Empirical evidence suggests that even those firms presumably most in need of monitoringintensive financing (young, small, and innovative firms) have a multitude of bank lenders, where one may be special in the sense of relationship lending. However, theory does not tell us a lot about the...

The paper takes advantage of exceptionally rich longitudinal data on the universe of labor force participants in Slovenia and simulates the working of an income contingent loan scheme to partly recover tuition costs. The simulations show that under the base variant (where the target cost...

This paper analyzes optimal incentive compatible debt contracts when lenders are risk averse. The decisive factor in this regard is that risk aversion requiresto consider further sources of risk the lenders are exposed to. The main resultsderived in a setting of asymmetric information – the...

This paper studies optimal risk-taking and information disclosure by firms that obtain financing from both a 'relationship' bank and 'arm's-length' banks. We find that firm decisions are asymmetrically influenced by the degree of heterogeneity among banks: lowly-collateralized firms vary optimal...

We present a dynamic general equilibrium model with agency costs, where heterogenous firms choose among two alternative instruments of external finance - coporate bonds and bank loans. We characterize the financing choice of firms and the endogeous financial structure of the economy. The...

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....

This paper uses an overlapping generations framework to analyze the implications of different financing regimes in the education sector for human capital formation and economic welfare. Agents privately invest in education after they have received a noisy information signal about their...

This paper analyses the relations between the banking system fluctuations, on one hand, and taxation and public spending, on the other one, using a VECM methodology. We find some evidence of prociclicality of fiscal policy using variables such as government spending, taxes, and primary surplus....