Using a dataset covering 3 million commercial borrower financial statements, we document a substantial, nearly monotonic decline in banks’ use of attested financial statements (AFS) in lending over the past two decades. Two market forces help explain this trend. First, technological advances...

The aim of this paper is analyzing the evolution of the Brazilian credit market from 2003 to 2011 and its impact on inequality in Brazil. The arguments are organized as follows. After an introductory section, the second one presents the determinants and the general trends of the banking credit...

In Thailand, the government has long recognized the importance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to the economy and has given a large amount of financial support to this sector. Still, SMEs are not able to catch up with larger enterprises and the constraints to SME financing remain...

State-owned banks tend to increase lending before elections for the purpose of boosting the re-election odds of incumbent politicians. We employ monthly data on individual banks to study whether Russian banks increased their lending before presidential elections during 2004-2019, a period...

We investigate whether European banks adjust their loan prices and volumes of new lending in the months running up to major national elections. Using a unique dataset that draws on data covering some 250 banksin 19 Eurozone countries from 2010 to 2020 at monthly frequency, and that includes...