This paper investigates the performance of Germany's three-pillar banking system in providing financial services nationwide, regarding different outreach indicators. At the federal state level, bank outreach shows South-North and West-East gaps. Combining regional and bank data at the district...

Existing literature sees opportunistic behaviour of contractual partners as the main reason why rational agents underinvest in relationship-specific assets. We look beyond this well-know holdup problem and argue that financial vulnerability and short-term planning horizon can also lead to such...

The financing of agricultural producers is one of the most acute problems along the entire scope of economic reforms in Kazakhstan. The issue is: What kind of financial sources could maintain the development of agricultural production? Internal sources such as profit, depreciation capital, and...

Credit reporting systems are an important ingredient for financial markets. These systems are based upon the unique identification of borrowers, which is enabled if a compulsory identification system exists in a country. We present evidence derived from difference-in-difference analyses on the...

The financial crisis affected regions in Europe in a different magnitude. This is why we examine whether regions which incorporate banks with a higher intermediation quality grow faster in “normal” times and are more resilient in “bad” ones. For this purpose, we measure the...

We test how bank market power influences technical change and resource allocation of informationally opaque firms. We use a dataset with approximately 700,000 firm-year observations of German small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) to identify the effect of bank market power using the...

Using a novel way to identify relationship and transaction banks, we study how banks' lending techniques affect funding to SMEs over the business cycle. For 21 countries we link the lending techniques that banks use in the direct vicinity of firms to these firms' credit constraints at two...

An influential strand of literature starting with the Nobel Prize winning work of Oliver Williamson (1971, 1975) argues that a rational agent underinvests in relationship-specific assets due to the possibility of an opportunistic behaviour on the part of her contractual partner. We first combine...

The effect of lenders' information sharing on the volume of credit is ambiguous in theory and underexplored empirically. Departing from the scant existing literature, which draws on country-level aggregate data, we study the impact of information sharing on the volume of private credit by...

This paper examines whether European regions which incorporate banks with a higher intermediation quality grow faster and are more resilient to negative shocks than its less efficient peers. For this purpose, we measure a bank's intermediation quality by estimating its profit and cost efficiency...