The purpose of this paper is to assess whether the widely-held markup theory of interest rate determination, first put forth by Rousseas in the mid-1980s, is sufficiently robust empirically or whether one aspect of Keynesian liquidity preference theory, that which emphasizes the role of banks's...

Creditors are often passive because they are reluctant to show bad debts on their own balance sheets. We propose a simple general equilibrium model to study the externality effect of creditor passivity. The model yields rich insights into the phenomenon of creditor passivity, both in transition...

Conventional wisdom holds that overlending problems and banking crises in open economies are provoked by investor moral hazard, which is caused in turn by guarantees on deposits. This Paper shows that this is not necessarily the case: guarantees on deposits may even limit the losses banks...

Confirmation bias refers to cognitive errors that bias one towards one's own prior beliefs. A vast empirical literature documents its existence and psychologists identify it as one of the most problematic aspects of human reasoning. In this paper, we present three related scenarios where...

How do banks react to increased competition? Recent banking theory offers conflicting predictions about the impact of competition on bank orientation - i.e., the choice of relationship based versus transactional banking - and bank industry specialization. We empirically investigate the impact of...

Available studies on asymmetries in the monetary transmission mechanism within Europe are invariably based on macro-economic evidence: such evidence is abundant but often contradictory. This paper takes a different route by using micro-economic data. We use the information contained in the...

The paper investigates those aspects of economic transformation and long-term economic development where financial institutions can and should make a contribution. It also investigates the financial services industry as a sector and tries to point out the conditions which can enable financial...

This Paper studies the relationship between residential property prices and lending in Hong Kong. This is an interesting topic for three reasons. First, swings in property prices have been extremely large and frequent in Hong Kong. Second, under the currency board regime, monetary policy cannot...

This Paper considers the potential cost of subjective judgement and discretion in credit decisions. We show that subjectivity and discretion in the evaluation of borrowers create an incentive problem on the part of the lender. The lender's incentives to accept or reject a borrower depend only on...

We use a spatial Probit model to study banking crises and show that the probability of a systemic banking crisis depends on contagion and that this effect may result from business connections between institutions or from similarities between banking systems.