We examine the firm-level and country-level determinants of the currency denomination of small business loans. We introduce an information asymmetry between banks and firms in a model that also features the trade-off between the cost of debt and firm-level distress costs. Banks in our model...

This paper investigates the effects of international diversification of banks on the value of their M&A advice. We study bidder returns to 1,253 cross-border M&A announcements. We find that acquirers engaging a more internationally diversified financial advisor generate lower excess returns....

Abstract: Banking crises involve periods of persistently low credit and economic growth. Banks’ balance sheets are then weak but so are those of non-financial corporate borrowers. Hence, a crucial question is whether credit growth is low due to supply or to demand factors. However convincing...

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...

We survey the extant literature on the effects of both a bank’s organizational structure and the physical distance separating it from the lender on lending decisions. Banks do engage in spatial pricing, where the underlying mechanism can be both transportation costs and information...

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...