We provide evidence that credit lines offer liquidity insurance to borrowers. Borrowers are able toextensively use their credit lines in recessions and ahead of credit line cuts. In fact drawdowns andchanges in drawdowns predict internal credit rating downgrades and credit line cuts,...

The Basel I Accord introduced a discontinuity in required capital for undrawn credit commitments. While banks had to set aside capital when they extended commitments with maturities in excess of one year, short-term commitments were not subject to a capital requirement. We use this difference to...

We study how syndicated lending networks propagate natural disasters. Natural disasters lead to an increase in corporate credit demand in affected regions. Banks meet the increase in credit demand in part by reducing credit to distant regions, unaffected by disasters. Capital constraints play a...

The advent of the euro has eroded many of the barriers that segmented the European corporate bond market along currency lines and given rise to a unified market comparable in size to the one denominated in US dollars. In doing so, the new currency has made it easier for investment banks to...

When supervisors have imperfect information about the soundness of banks, they may be unaware of insolvency problems that develop in the interval between on-site examinations. Supervising banks more often will alleviate this problem but will increase the costs of supervision. This paper analyzes...

This paper reviews the theoretical literature on bank capital regulation and analyses some of the approaches to redesigning the 1988 Basel Accord on capital standards. The paper starts with a review of the literature on the design of the financial system and the existence of banks. It proceeds...

This paper looks at the advantages and disadvantages of mixing banking and commerce, using the quot;liquidityquot; approach to financial intermediation. Bringing a nonfinancial firm into a banking conglomerate may be advantageous because it may make it easier for the bank to dispose of assets...

This paper brings together two seemingly unrelated branches of the literature that focuses on different aspects of a bank's interaction with its borrowers: the relative priority of bank debt, and the role of banks as quot;relationship lendersquot;. Specifically, we show that bank seniority plays...

This paper analyzes the potential effects of commercial banks' expansion into the securities business, taking into account the underlying conditions assumed by the modern literature to explain the existence of financial intermediaries. The analysis focuses on the gains claimed to emerge with...

This paper investigates whether investors' domestic experience helps them enter foreign markets. We show that investors first invest in domestic securities and only some time later they invest in foreign securities. Our investigation of the length of time it takes investors to start investing in...