Minimum capital requirement regulation forces banks to refund a substantial amount of their investments with equity. This creates a buffer against losses, but also in- creases the cost of funding. If higher refunding costs translate into higher loan interest rates, then borrowers are likely to...

This paper finds a strong empirical link between domestic banking sector competitiveness and de facto international integration. De-facto international integration is measured through a new index of financial integration, which measures, for deviations from covered interest parity, the size of...

We investigate the role of competition on the outcome of Austrian Treasury auctions. Austria's EU accession led to an increase in the number of banks participating in treasury auctions. We use structural estimates of bidders' private values to examine the effect of increased competition on...

In this paper, we address the question whether increasing households' financial market access improves welfare in a financial system in which there is intense competition among banks for private households' funds. Following earlier work by Diamond and by Fecht, we use a model in which the degree...

In this paper we present a political economy approach in order to explain the degree of financial openness for an economy. In the model, entrepreneurs, who may have good or bad projects, vote for policies, which are proposed by selfish politicians. Two political frictions (ideological adherence...

We propose a model in which firms use corporate governance as part of an optimal compensation scheme: better governance incentivizes managers to perform better and thus saves on the cost of providing pay for performance. However, when managerial talent is scarce, firms compete to attract better...

This paper investigates the relationship between bank competition and credit procyclicality for 17 OECD countries on the 1986-2009 period. We account for heterogeneity among countries in terms of bank competition through the use of a hierarchical clustering methodology. We then estimate panel...

The paper presents a model where financial intermediaries invest in a safe and a risky, two-period asset -with aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks on tire risky asset. The realization of returns is privately observed by banks, which offer deposit contracts, with a promised return at t = 1, the...

We assess the effects on the welfare of corporate borrowers of the recent wave of bank consolidations in the United States that has produced a small number of very large banks. Our evidence from a sample of more than 3,000 commercial borrowers from banks involved in large mergers indicates that...