During the last years the lending business has come under considerable competitive pressure and bank managers often express concern regarding its profitability vis-a-vis other activities. This paper tries to empirically identify factors that are able to explain the financial performance of bank...

We investigate two questions: (1) Do bank lending decisions to small and medium-sized firms provide information about these firms' future financial performance? (2) Does this predictability vary across different stages of the credit cycle? Based on a unique, detailed data set of all Norwegian...

We investigate two questions: (1) Do bank lending decisions to small and medium-sized firms provide information about these fi rms' future fi nancial performance? (2) Does this predictability vary across different stages of the credit cycle? Based on a unique, detailed data set of all Norwegian...

We examine earnings forecasts by sell-side analysts employed by a bank with a lending relationship with the covered firms. We find that lender-affiliated analysts' forecasts are more accurate than forecasts by their unaffiliated peers after establishment of the lending relationship. Evidence...

Within bank activities, which is normally defined as the joint exercise of savings collection and credit supply, risk-taking is natural, as in many human activities. Among risks related to credit intermediation, credit risk assumes particular importance. It is most simply defined as the...

Analysis of bank lending surveys in the USA and Europe and their predictive power in credit creation and subsequent GDP growth is examined. OLS as well as vector autoregression models are applied. Results indicate that lending surveys in Europe are better predictors of credit in the economy and...

We analyse the impact of soft information on US mortgages for default prediction and provide a new measure for lender soft information that is based on the interest rates offered to borrowers and incremental to public hard information. Hard and soft information provide for a variation in annual...

When race is not directly observed, regulators and analysts commonly predict it using algorithms based on last name and address. In small business lending--where regulators assess fair lending law compliance using the Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) algorithm--we document large...

Proxies for race are commonly used in settings where race cannot be observed directly. In the context of small business lending, we examine the standard race prediction algorithm (BISG), which regulators use to assess compliance with fair lending laws. The algorithm relies on an individual’s...

Roll rates and net flow rates can be seen as the evolution of ageing of accounts receivable and Markov chains. They are accepted methodologies to model the behavior of non-performing consumer loans by buckets and to predict losses, but we find that quite often they are wrongly used as...