Fund managers are double agents; they serve both fund investors and owners of management firms. This conflict of interest may result in trading to support securities prices. Tests of this hypothesis in the Spanish mutual fund industry indicate that bank-affiliated mutual funds systematically...

We study the time-varying risk exposures of US bank holding companies for the 1986–2012 period by decomposing total bank risk into systematic banking-industry risk, systematic market-wide risk, and idiosyncratic bank risk. Banking-industry risk factors directly relate to the banks’ financial...

Why do some banks fail in financial crises while others survive? This article answers this question by analysing the effect of the Dutch financial crisis of the 1920s on 142 banks, of which 33 failed. We find that choices of balance sheet composition and product market strategy made in the...

Poorly developed financial markets are widely believed to block economic growth, because only modern financial intermediaries such as banks can mobilize large amounts of financial capital at low cost. This claim is supported by cross country regressions, but the regressions assume that credit...

We examine whether more sophisticated accounting methods (in the form of accrual accounting) interact with other information sources to reduce information asymmetries between small business borrowers and lenders, thereby lowering borrowers׳ probability of loan denial and cost of debt. We find...

This paper has a twofold interest. First, we construct new concentration measures that alleviate some shortcomings of the most frequently applied indexes, which are Herfindahl-Hirshman and Entropy measures. They also provide additional information about the way in which the loan portfolio is...

This paper describes the transmission of the recent financial crisis to Japan and compares the monetary policy reactions by the Bank of Japan (BoJ) with those during the 1990s, and with reactions by other major central banks. The paper first reviews the recent literature on the origins and...

This paper investigates contagion in the German interbank market under the assumption of a stochastic loss given default (LGD). We combine a unique data set about the LGD of interbank loans with detailed data about interbank exposures. We find that the frequency distribution of the LGD is...

The Banque de France organised a symposium on microfinance in July 2011. Based on the experience of Southern countries, the participants stressed the usefulness of microfinance as an instrument for financial inclusion, economic development and poverty reduction. They proposed several avenues for...

SMEs have a different bank financing structure from that of large companies and thus do not enjoy the same financing conditions. This article examines the main factors that explain the interest rates on loans to SMEs and highlights the impact of the 2008 financial crisis on credit pricing policies.