Difficulty in accessing finance is one of the critical factors constraining the development of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Asia. Owing to their significance to national economies, it is important to find ways to provide SMEs with stable finance. One efficient way to promote SME...

Monitoring is one of the main activities explaining the existence of banks, yet empirical evidence about its effect on loan outcomes is scant. Using granular loan-level information from the Italian Credit Register, we build a novel measure of bank monitoring based on banks' requests for...

This paper analyses the determinants of banks loan loss allowances for samples of US banks and three non-US samples: a group of 21 countries, Canada and Japan.The model includes fundamental (or non-discretionary) determinants of the allowance such as non-performing loans, and discretionary...