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...

Russia has witnessed a high number of bank failures over the last two decades. Using monthly data for 2002-2020, spanning four election cycles, we test the hypothesis that bank failures are less likely before presidential elections. We find that bank failures are less likely to occur in the...

We study whether bank efficiency is related to bank ownership in Russia. We find that foreign banks are more efficient than domestic private banks and - surprisingly - that domes-tic private banks are not more efficient than domestic public banks. These results are not driven by the choice of...

This paper considers whether local bank participation exerts an impact on the spreads for syndicated loans in Russia. Following Berger, Klapper and Udell (2001), we test whether local banks possess a superior ability to deal with information asymmetries. Using a sample of 528 syndicated loans to...