The main strategic objective of bank-affiliated venture capital funds (BVCs) is to enhance demand of debt capital from portfolio companies. This paper investigates the channels through which banks pursue such a strategy. Using detailed data from seven Western European countries in the period...

This paper investigates how bank CEO risk-taking incentives influence bank lending decisions. Consistent with the existing CEO incentive literature, we find that CEOs with higher risk-taking incentives (vega) tend to relax their lending standards in bank loan contracts to pursue higher...

This paper investigates whether firms' pollution records influence their financing costs. Evidence shows that lending banks demand significantly higher loan spreads, higher total borrowing costs, shorter loan maturities, smaller loan sizes, and greater collateral from firms with higher levels of...

This paper is the first to empirically study the effects of different types of corporate culture on the risk-taking behavior of European banks. Based on a text analysis approach following the competing values framework, we analyze a hand-collected sample of 167 European banks from 2005 to 2015....

Banks finance newly-founded firms extensively despite severe asymmetric information. Whereas the demand for credit usually follows from entrepreneurs' lack of liquidity, we ask why and how banks supply credit to new firms of unknown value. We propose a model of credit allocation in which, due to...

This study examines whether changes in CAMEL variables matter in explaining bank closure. Using a unique set of monthly bank-specific balance sheet data from Russia, we estimate determinants of bank license withdrawals during 2013m7-2017m7. We make two key findings. First, changes in CAMEL...

We examine the impact on a firm when it is exogenously forced to switch its bank relationship from one branch to another branch of the same bank. We show the effect depends directly on the relative balance between the hard accounting information provided to the bank by the firm, as part of the...

The experience of the 2007-09 financial crisis has prompted much consideration of the link between the structure of compensation in financial firms and excessive risk taking by their employees. A key concern has been that compensation design rewards managers for pursuing risky strategies but...

Since the 2008-09 global financial crisis, banks are criticized for levering up their balance sheets to reach for return on equity (ROE) target. We conduct the first systematic study on banks' actual practice of targeting ROE, based on a unique hand-collected data for 188 publicly listed...