A recent string of theoretical papers highlights the importance of geographical distance in explaining pricing and availability of loans to small firms.Lenders located in the vicinity of small firms have significantly lower monitoring and transaction costs, and hence considerable market power if...

Recent theoretical models argue that a bank's organizational structure reflects its lending technology.A hierarchically organized bank will employ mainly hard information, whereas a decentralized bank will rely more on soft information.We investigate theoretically and empirically how bank...

Abstract: The recent financial crisis has reopened the debate on the impact of informal and formal finance on firm growth in developing countries. Using unique survey data, we find that informal finance is associated with higher sales growth for small firms and lower sales growth for large...

We propose a heteroscedastic regression model to identify the determinants of the dispersion in interest rates on loans granted to small and medium sized enterprises. We interpret unexplained deviations as evidence of the banks’ discretionary use of market power in the loan rate setting...

A recent string of theoretical papers has highlighted the importance of geographical distance in explaining loan rates for small firms.Lenders located in the vicinity of small firms face significantly lower transportation and monitoring costs, and hence wield considerable market power, if...

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.We empirically investigate the impact of interbank competition on bank branch...

This paper examines how bank relationships affect firm performance. An empirical implication of recent theoretical models is that firms maintaining multiple bank relationships are less profitable than their single-bank peers. We investigate this empirical implication using a data set containing...