This paper analyzes interest rates quoted by individual banks for personal and automobile loans in 10 cities. Personal loan rates are higher in concentrated markets, and banks involved in mergers reduce personal rates relative to their competitors prior to the merger's completion. This is...

The recent wave of bank mergers has raised concern with its effect on competition. This paper examines the influence of concentration and merger activity on consumer loan interest rates. It uses Bank Rate Monitor, Inc. survey data on loan rates quoted weekly by large commercial banks in ten...

Previous studies have shown that the pattern of first day returns to initialpublic offerings is consistent with the hypotheses of underpricing and price support. We examine two different periods, 1975–1984 and 1996–2002, and find that in each case the measures of price support and...

Like security prices, retail deposit interest rates cluster around integers and "even" fractions. However, explanations for security price clustering are incompatible with deposit rate clustering. A theory based on the limited recall of retail depositors is proposed. It predicts that banks tend...

This paper provides an optimal contracting framework to determine the equilibrium structure of receivables securitization in the presence of moral hazard. An incentive compatible contract is designed where the seller monitors at an efficient level and retains an equity interest in a portion of...

This paper uses Taiwanese data to examine the impact of firm-level corporate governance mechanisms on firms’ average cash holdings. Specifically, it examines how a firm’s number of banking relationships and the percentages of managerial ownership and board ownership impact the firm’s level...

An examination of banks' optimal deposit-rate-setting behavior when some customers have limited recall, showing that when banks exploit this phenomenon, deposit rates will tend to be set at round fractions and will be relatively "sticky" at these levels.

This paper presents a flexible, lattice-based structural credit risk model that uses equity market information and a detailed depiction of a financial institution’s liability structure to analyze default risk. The model is applied to examine the term structure of default probabilities for...