Significant differences in loan terms between demographically distinct groups of borrowers in the United States are often interpreted as evidence of systematic ethnic, racial or gender discrimination by lenders. The appearance and interpretation of such discrimination has long been a...

Does the Church Tower Principle, i.e. geographical proximity between borrowing firm and lending bank, matter in credit risk management? If so, the bank might expose itself to a greater risk by lending to distant firms and should therefore respond by rationing them harder. In this paper we...

Business cycles imply liquidity risks for banks. This paper explores how these risks influence bank lending over the cycle. With forward-looking banks, lending cycles, credit booms and busts, or suppressed and highly fragile bank systems can emerge, depending on the magnitude of liquidity risks....

Current empirical methods to identify and assess the impact of bank credit supply shocks rely strictly on multi-bank firms and ignore firms borrowing from only one bank. Yet, these single-bank firms are often the majority of firms in an economy and most prone to credit supply shocks. We propose...