This paper utilizes data on the presence of prominent individuals — that is, those with political (e.g., Members of Parliament) and aristocratic titles (e.g., lords) — on the boards of directors of English and Welsh banks from 1879-1909 to investigate whether the appointment of...

Does related lending have positive or negative effects on the development of banking systems? This paper analyzes a unique cross-country data set covering 74 countries from 1990 to 2007, and finds that related lending, on average, does not have any effect on the growth of credit. The authors do...

Does related lending have positive or negative effects on the development of banking systems? We analyze a unique cross-country data set covering 74 countries from 1990 to 2007, and find that related lending, on average, does not have any effect on the growth of credit. We do find, however, that...

This paper examines political determinants of government banks' lending decisions using the prefecture-level panel data on Japan's government loans from 1975 to 1992. It finds that the size of government loans is positively correlated with two political factors: (1) the electoral vulnerability...

This paper exploits the international transmission of business cycles to examine the prevalence of attribution error in economic voting in a large panel of countries from 1990-2009. We find that voters, on average, exhibit a strong tendency to oust incumbent governments during an economic...

We investigate the economic impacts of bank levies on bank-dependent borrowers, exploiting the surprise announcement of a bank tax by the Tokyo metropolitan government on February 7th, 2000. We find that the tax announcement had negative effects on the abnormal return of firms which depended on...