This paper shows that finance has been a key ingredient of long-term economic growth in OECD and G20 countries over the past half-century, but that there can be too much finance. The evidence indicates that at current levels of household and business credit further expansion slows rather than...

In 2002 and 2003, many Chinese banks implemented reforms that delegated authority to individual loan officers. The change followed China's entrance into the WTO and offers a plausibly exogenous shock to loan officer incentives to produce information. We find that the bank's internal risk rating...

Cyclicality in the supply of business credit has been the focus of a considerable amount of research. This cyclicality can stem from shocks to borrowers' collateral, which affect firms' ability to raise capital if agency and information problems are significant (Ben S. Bernanke and Mark Gertler,...

In this paper I compare a traditional demand oriented model of bank lending with its focus on short-term interest rates in the money market, to a non-traditional capital budgeting model of bank lending based on movements in share valuations for the Euro area. Using non-nested hypothesis tests,...

This paper aims to determine the role of the expected credit loss approach as defined in IFRS 9 in the effects of capital ratio on loans growth in publicly traded banks in Poland. To resolve this problem, we apply semi-annual data of individual banks in 2012-2018. Using several estimation...

Policymakers introduce bank levies (BLs) to reduce the probability of crises. In this study, we evaluate the effects of the Hungarian and German BLs implemented in 2010 and 2011, respectively, on the banks' risk-taking behavior. Our analysis compares two completely different BL designs. The...

How much of non-performing loans can be explained by loan growth? If an increase in loan growth leads to higher profitability but does not necessarily cause non-performing loans to increase in the short run, banks with (managerial) short-termism will be ex ante incentivized to grant more loans...

This paper studies the effect of low interest rates on financial intermediation and the transmission of monetary policy. Using U.S. bank- and branch-level data, I document two new facts: first, the long-run decline in bond rates has not been fully passed through to loan rates; second, the...

We show that the steep decline in traditional bank mortgage lending after the crisis was primarily driven by a widespread withdrawal by the four largest U.S. banks (Big4). In contrast, small banks maintain their aggregate share in this market despite rapid nonbank growth throughout the country....

Banks open more branches and make more lending near their Chief Executive Officers' (CEOs) childhood hometowns. The effects are stronger among information-ally opaque borrowers and among CEOs who spend more time in their childhood hometowns. Furthermore, loans originated near CEOs' hometowns...