This study proposes an information asymmetry hypothesis to examine why bank credit ratings vary among countries even when bank financial ratios remain constant. Countries are divided among those with low and high information asymmetry. The former include high-income countries, those in North America and West Europe regions, and those with strong institutional environment quality, whereas the la...

Banks in non-metropolitan areas compete in a spatially differentiated environment. Non-metro community banks have been insulated from increasing competition from metro banks due to their reliance on soft information in relationship lending. Proximity to borrowers, therefore, may be an important source of market power for non-metro community banks. This paper estimates a structural model of the ...

The objective of this paper is to estimate the impacts of medium and long term participation in microfinance programs. It utilises a new, large and unique panel dataset collected from treatment and control households from 1997 to 2005. The data enables us to identify continuing participants in the program as well as newcomers and leavers. We employ different estimation strategies including trip...

In the 1980s, housing market analysts and policymakers were concerned that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were not adequately facilitating the financing of affordable housing for lowand moderate-income families. To address these concerns, the Department of Housing and Urban Development established quantitative Affordable Housing Goals requiring the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) to increas...

In this paper, we explore the loss data collection exercise for operational risk in Chinese commercial banks from 1999 to first half of 2006. Firstly, the above data are bootstrapped to analyze the capital allocation for a medium-scaled commercial bank in China. Secondly, for every selected cell, we calibrate two truncated distributions to fit the loss severity, one for ‘normal’ losses and the ...

The objective of this paper is to measure the productive efficiency of banks in a developing country, that is, India. The measurement of efficiency is done using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Two models have been constructed to show how efficiency scores vary with change in inputs and outputs. The efficiency scores, for three groups of banks, that is, publicly owned, privately owned and fore...

We develop a model in which cash-constrained entrepreneurs seek a venture capitalist (VC) to finance a new firm. Costly monitoring is employed by VCs to reduce entrepreneurial moral hazard. When monitoring reveals poor performance, VCs want to punish the entrepreneur with liquidation. However, when assets are specific and liquidation would lead to a loss, VCs choose to renegotiate the terms of ...

We seek to assess the effect of commercial property price movements on the behaviour and performance of individual banks in a range of industrialised economies, extending the existing micro literature on bank performance. Our results suggest that commercial property prices tend to be positively associated with bank lending and profitability, and negatively associated with banks’ net interest ma...

This paper analyzes the determinants of bank acquisitions both within and across 25 members of the European Union (EU-25) during the period 1997–2004. Our results suggest that poorly managed banks (those with a high cost-to-income ratio) and larger banks are more likely to be acquired by other banks in the same country. The probability of being a target in a cross-border deal is larger for bank...

In attempting to promote bank stability, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (2006) provides a framework that seeks to control the amount of tail risk that large banks take in their trading books. However, banks around the world suffered sizeable trading losses during the recent crisis. Due to the size and prevalence of losses, a formal examination of whether the Basel framework allows b...