Banks have progressively evolved from being standalone institutions to being subsidiaries of increasingly complex financial conglomerates. We conjecture and provide evidence that the organizational complexity of the family of a bank is a fundamental driver of the business model of the bank...

Banks play a special role as providers of informative signals about the quality and value of their borrowers. Such signals, however, may have a quality of their own as the banks’ selection and monitoring abilities may differ. Using an event study methodology, we study the importance of the...

Banks play a role in the corporate governance of firms as well as acting as debt financiers around the world. Universal banks can have control over borrowing firms by representation on the board of directors or by holding shares through direct stakes or institutional holdings. We investigate the...

We examine the coexistence of banks and financial markets, studying a credit market where the qualities of investment projects are not observable and the investment decisions of entrepreneurs are not contractible. Standard banks can alleviate moral-hazard problems by securing a portion of a...

Should banks be diversified or focused? Does diversification indeed lead to enhanced performance and, therefore, greater safety for banks, as traditional portfolio and banking theory would suggest? This paper investigates the link between banks? profitability (ROA) and their portfolio...

Ongoing financial innovation and greater information availability increase the tradability of bank assets and reduce banks' dependence on individual bank managers as private information in the lending process declines. In this paper we argue that this has two effects on banks, with opposing...

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...

The globalization of banking in the United States is influencing the monetary transmission mechanism both domestically and in foreign markets. Using quarterly information from all U.S. banks filing call reports between 1980 and 2005, we find evidence for the lending channel for monetary policy...

Credit derivatives are the latest in a series of innovations that have had a significant impact on credit markets. Using a micro data set of individual corporate loans, this paper explores whether use of credit derivatives is associated with an increase in bank credit supply. We find evidence...

The globalization of banking in the United States is influencing the monetary transmission mechanism both domestically and in foreign markets. Using quarterly information from all U.S. banks filing call reports between 1980 and 2006, we show that globalized banks activate internal capital...