I address the following issue in this paper: how does information sharing among banks about borrowers affect banks' competition, and ultimately, the interest rate borrowers pay for the loan they take? One would expect that full information sharing among banks reduces lenders' risk and results in...

We measure the consequences of asymmetric information and imperfect competition in the Italian lending market. We show that banks' optimal price response to an increase in adverse selection varies with competition. Exploiting matched data on loans and defaults, we estimate models of demand for...

This paper analyzes whether the political connections of listed firms in the United States affect the cost and terms of loan contracts. Using a hand-collected data set of the political connections of S&P 500 companies over the 2003-2008 time period, we find that the cost of bank loans is...

We study the corporate-loan pricing decisions of a major Greek bank during the Greek financial crisis. A unique aspect of our dataset is that we observe both the interest rate and the ``breakeven rate'' of each loan, as computed by the bank's own loan-pricing department (in effect, the loan's...