Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are important for employment and economic activity; however, they are perceived to lack adequate financing, which hampers their growth. As a consequence, governments have implemented a number of programs to foster SME lending and attention has focused on...

The role of the banking industry in export promotion cannot be over-emphasized as banks provide the necessary financial support for borrowers in various industries to undertake investment activities. With the help of an industry-level dataset on bilateral trade flows between various countries, I...

On May 11-12, 2011, SUERF, the Belgian Financial Forum, the Brussels Finance Institute and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) jointly organised the 29th SUERF Colloquium New paradigms in money and finance? The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the...

Failure in bank corporate governance has been seen as a contributing factor to excessive risk-taking pre-crisis with devastating implications as risks realised during the financial crisis. Unfortunately, the empirical evidence on the impact of managerial incentives on bank crisis performance is...

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are important for employment and economic activity; however, they are perceived to lack adequate financing, which hampers their growth. As a consequence, governments have implemented a number of programs to foster SME lending and attention has focused on...

The role of the banking industry in export promotion cannot be over-emphasized as banks provide the necessary financial support for borrowers in various industries to undertake investment activities. With the help of an industry-level dataset on bilateral trade flows between various countries, I...

We exploit the cross-state, cross-time variation in bank tangible capital ratios-brought about by bank branch deregulation on a state-by-state basis-to identify the effects of bank capital pressures on employment and firm dynamics during two waves of changes in bank capital regulation. We show...

This paper offers evidence that bank managers adjust key strategic variables following a risk and/or valuation signal. Banks receive a risk signal when they have a substantially higher volatility compared to the best performing bank(s) with similar business model characteristics, and a valuation...

The disappointingly slow recovery in the U.S. from the recent recession and financial crisis has once again focused attention on the relationship between financial frictions and economic growth. With bank loans having only recently started growing and still sluggish, some bankers and borrowers...

We exploit variation in commercial bank capital ratios across states to identify the impact of commercial bank balance sheet pressures manifested through changes in capital ratios on employment in the manufacturing sector. For industries dependent on external finance, we find that an increase in...