Research on bank financial intermediation in a country's narrower territorial units is scarce, in both domestic and international literature. Banks are almost the only financial intermediaries in narrower territorial units and their role is substantial, ranging from participating in regional...

We present a model in which fire sales propagate shocks across bank balance sheets. When a bank experiences a negative shock to its equity, a natural way to return to target leverage is to sell assets. If potential buyers are limited, then asset sales depress prices, in which case one bank׳s...

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...

Real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems often incorporate features designed to economise on liquidity. Such 'hybrid features' have the potential to mitigate the systemic impact of operational disruptions of participants. This paper simulates operational disruptions of participants, using data...

In this paper we empirically analyse the factors which determined consumer credit in Greece in the period before and after the financial liberalisation, while accounting for significant changes in structure due to the lifting of credit restrictions and the subsequent impressive boom of consumer...

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...