Assessing the impacts of bank mergers on small firms requires separating borrowers with single versus multiple banking relationships and distinguishing the three alternatives of "staying," "dropping," and "switching" of relationship. Single-relationship borrowers who "switch" to another bank...

Recent theoretical models argue that a bank’s organizational structure reflects its lending technology. A hierarchically organized bank will employ mainly hard information, whereas a decentralized bank will rely more on soft information. We investigate theoretically and empirically how bank...

The author studies the conditions under which banks offer remote access. Note there exists interaction between location and taste for remote access. Offering remote access is an instrument to (partially) segment depositors according to their taste for that technology. The interaction between...

Robust (cross-border) interbank markets are important for the well functioning of modern financial systems. Yet, a network of interbank exposures may lead to domino effects following the event of an initial bank failure. The structure of the interbank market is a potential important driving...

We present a dynamic microstructure model where a dealer market (DM) and a crossing network (CN) interact. Sequentially arriving traders with different valuations for an asset maximise their profits either by trading on a DM or by submitting an order for (possibly) uncertain execution via a CN....

This paper studies the impact of bank mergers on firm-bank lending relationships using information from individual loan contracts in Belgium. We analyse the effects of bank mergers on the probability of borrowers maintaining their lending relationships and on their ability to continue tapping...

We employ a unique dataset to study the impact of foreign bank ownership and mode of entry on banks’ lending rates to transparent and opaque borrowers. We find that greenfield banks charge lower lending rates on average and we test for two hypotheses that can explain the lower cost of credit...

We propose a heteroscedastic regression model to identify the determinants of the dispersion in interest rates on loans granted to small and medium sized enterprises. We interpret unexplained deviations as evidence of the banks’ discretionary use of market power in the loan rate setting...

This paper shows that banking development spurs growth, even in a country with a high growth rate such as China. Employing data of 27 Chinese provinces over the period 1995-2003, we study whether the financial development of two different types of institutions ?banks and non-bank financial...