Reliable information on small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) is rare and costly for financial intermediaries. To compensate for this, relationship banking is often considered as the appropriate lending technique in the case of SMEs. In this paper we offer a theoretical model to analyze the...

The study assesses whether incorporating macroeconomic variables and characteristics of the credit portfolio improves the specification of models designed to identify management discretion in making loan loss provisions by banks, considering the norms issued by regulatory agencies. The empirical...

The recent global financial crisis has intensified calls to make the financial sector less crisis-prone, and to this end to make impairment recognition rules for debt instruments more forward looking. To better understand the behavior of different impairment rules and their potential effect on...

This paper is the first to examine whether the loan loss provisioning behavior of Islamic banks is procyclical. From a dynamic panel data methodology, the empirical results show that loan loss provisioning in Islamic banks is indeed procyclical, as higher economic growth leads to a decline in...

Private firms with relatively high costs of disclosure may benefit from a close relationship with a bank. Relationship lending is based on intertemporal contracting and requires the bank to acquire private information about the firm and, moreover, to keep this information private. For both...

This paper empirically analyzes the determinants of credit default swap (CDS) spreads from a sample of 45 listed European banks over the 2004-2010 period. We use variables related to accounting- and market-based data, an indicator of liquidity in the CDS market and several variables from the...

I examine banks' management of earnings through syndicated lending activities. This novel setting allows a transaction-specific, within-quarter analysis of real earnings management. My findings suggest that public lenders that narrowly beat earnings benchmarks, to book origination fees, initiate...

We examine the effects of CEO turnover in banks. Incoming bank CEOs face problems from information asymmetry because banks' operations are opaque and bank risk can change dramatically in a short time. Incoming bank CEOs may therefore change bank policies to manage their personal risks. Since CEO...

Banks collect private information for the purpose of monitoring borrowers. However, we have little evidence on the sources of private information they use. This study investigates whether and how banks use private information about regulatory oversight of public disclosures through the SEC...

Private firms often rely on insider lending, e.g. by banks. Insider lending is based on lending relationships that typically involve intertemporal loan pricing: losses from early years are recovered by information rents in later years, stemming from private information the inside lender has...