This paper analyzes banks' choice between lending to firms individually and sharing lending with other banks, when firms and banks are subject to moral hazard and monitoring is essential. Multiple-bank lending is optimal whenever the benefit of greater diversification in terms of higher...

Lending specialization on certain industry sectors can have opposing effects on monitoring (including screening) abilities and on the sectoral concentration risk of a credit portfolio. In this paper, we examine in the first part if monitoring abilities of German cooperative banks and savings...

This paper analyses the role of banks in financing SMEs in Britain and Germany. It applies a sociological institutionalist approach to understand how banks construct and manage risk, relating to SME business. The empirical analysis is based on the results of a comparative survey of a sample of...

We study the effects of the reform of the system of severance payments (TFR) of Italian employees on the cost and the access to credit for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). The most direct consequence of the reform is to reduce in the long run the amount of liquid assets available to...

Constructing a strong and unique instrument for bank capital from the empirical observation of Japanese banks' past behavioral changes, we identify the impact of capital adequacy on the allocation of bank lending supply across low quality and high quality borrowers. We find that, in FY 1997, a...

We develop a sovereign debt model with offcial and private creditors where default risk depends on both the level and the composition of liabilities. Higher exposure to offcial lenders improves incentives to repay but carries extra costs, such as reduced ex-post flexibility. The model implies...

In der Öffentlichkeit wurden Befürchtungen geäußert, dass Basel II den Mittelstand benachteilige, indem die Kreditverfügbarkeit für die Unternehmen eingeschränkt und ihre Zinskosten steigen würden. Für Dr. Werner Müller, Bundeswirtschaftsminister, ist diese Frage »derzeit noch nicht...

Im November letzten Jahres veranstaltete das Europäische Patentamt einen Workshop zu den Veränderungen, die sich aus der Einführung von Vorschlägen zur Neufassung der Baseler Eigenkapitalvereinbarung von 1988 ergeben, die darauf zielen, die Kapitalanforderungen an Banken stärker als bisher...

We examine banking competition when deposit or loan contracts contingent on macroeconomic shocks become feasible. We show that the risk allocation is efficient, provided that banks are not bailed out. In this case, banks may shift part of the risk to depositors. The private sector insures the...

Interest payments based on income flows are a common feature of informal loans. Such so-called `interlinked loans' can be seen as an insurance against very low disposable incomes, as interest payments are lowest when income turns out to be low. This paper examines whether interlinked loans...