We have assembled a unique loan-level performance dataset for mortgages originated in the UK to study the differences in default likelihood between loans of varying borrower and loan characteristics. We can broadly confirm the relevance of most commonly known riskfactors and find that most...

The authors formulate and test hypotheses about the role of bank ownership types-foreign, state-owned, and private domestic banks-in banking relationships, using data from India. The empirical results are consistent with all of their hypotheses with regard to foreign banks. These banks tend to...

The authors test competing theories of capital structure choices using firm-level data on firm borrowings. The majority of firms in the dataset are privately owned, young, micro or small and medium enterprise (SME) firms concentrated in the service sector. In general, the financing pattern of...

The financial literature documents a positive and robust relationship between development of financial systems and economic growth and a causal relationship between strong financial systems and per capita income. Policy prescriptions for developing countries suggest that governments should not...

Microfinance has demonstrated success as a poverty reduction strategy, but the critical challenge now is to make microfinance sustainable and ubiquitous. By increasing microfinance' s scope (number of individuals reached), impact (effect on well-being of borrowers), depth (ability to reach the...

We formulate and test hypotheses about the role of bank ownership type--foreign, state-owned, and private domestic banks--in banking relationships. Our application uses data from India, an important developing nation. The empirical results are consistent with all of our hypotheses with regard to...

This note demonstrates how performance measure congruity and noise determine an agency’s total surplus within an linear agency framework with multiple tasks. It provides a decomposition of agency costs, leading back to a congruity index previously proposed in the literature. In addition,...

We develop a model to show that cartels that produce goods with lower durability are easier to sustain implicitly. This observation gen- erates the following results: 1) implicit cartels have an incentive to pro- duce goods with an inefficiently low level of durability; 2) a monopoly or explicit...

In this paper, a promotion tournament is considered, where, at the beginning of the tournament, it is unknown how long the tournament lasts. Further, the promotion decision is based on the assessments of a supervisor with imperfect recall. In line with psychological research, the supervisor is...

Policy makers often decide to liberalize foreign bank entry but at the same time restrict the mode of entry. We study how different entry modes affect the interest rate for loans in a model in which domestic banks possess private information about their incumbent clients but foreign banks have...