We empirically examine whether the way a bank might use loan loss provisions to smooth its income is influenced by its ownership concentration and the regulatory environment. Using a panel of European commercial banks, we find evidence that banks with more concentrated ownership use...

This paper investigates the characteristics of US and Canadian pension funds that allocate assets to hedge funds. The typical pension fund that invests in hedge funds is a large sophisticated pension fund that diversi…es its portfolio across numerous classes of investments, private equity in...

This paper investigates the relationship between bank competition and credit procyclicality for 17 OECD countries on the 1986-2009 period. We account for heterogeneity among countries in terms of bank competition through the use of a hierarchical clustering methodology. We then estimate panel...

Abstract We empirically examine whether the way a bank might use loan loss provisions to smooth its income is in‡uenced by its ownership concentration and the regulatory environment. Using a panel of European commercial banks, we find evidence that banks with more concentrated ownership use...

This paper investigates hot money inflows in China. The financial liberalization comes into effect and the effectiveness of capital controls tends to diminish over time. As a result, China is fuelled by hot money inflows. The US interest rate cut since 2001 and expectations of exchange rate...

A panel of 186 European banks is used for the period 1992-2004 to determine if banking behaviors induced by the capital adequacy constraint and the provisioning system, amplify credit fluctuations. Our finding is consistent with the bank capital channel hypothesis, which means that poorly...