This study considers the impact of trustworthiness on financial markets at the individual transaction level. We employ a natural experiment using the peer-to-peer lending site, Prosper.com. We find that borrowers who are perceived as less trustworthy are economically and significantly less likely to have their loan requests filled, even controlling for physical attractiveness, detailed demograp...

We examine the relationship between the number of bank relationships and firms’ performance, evaluating possible differential effects related to firms’ size. Our sample of firms from Italy includes many small firms, 99 percent of which are not listed and for which bank debt is a major source of financing. In the sample, 4 percent of the firms have a single bank relationship, and 66 percent of t...

We analyze optimal risk management strategies of a bank financed with deposits and equity in a one period model. The bank’s motivation for risk management comes from deposits which can lead to bank runs. In the event of such a run, liquidation costs arise. The hedging strategy that maximizes the value of equity is derived. We identify conditions under which well known results such as complete h...

Competition among banks promotes growth and stability for an economy with production externality. Following Arrow and Debreu (1954) [6], I formulate a standard growth model with externality—a twoperiod version of Romer (1986) [39]—as a game among consumers, firms, and intermediaries. The Walrasian equilibrium, with an auctioneer, does not achieve the social optimum. Without an auctioneer or int...

Using firm level data from eight Sub-Saharan Africa countries we examine credit constraint differentials between male and female manufacturing entrepreneurs. Enterprises owned by female entrepreneurs are less likely to be credit constrained compared to their male counterparts. The magnitude of this credit constraint gap varies with constraint and ownership definitions but the direction of the g...

I study the optimal architecture of bank supervision in a federal system. A central supervisor gets information about a bank, for instance through stress-testing, and decides whether an on-site examination should be performed by a local or a central authority. Local supervisors have lower inspection costs, but do not internalize crossborder externalities. The optimal degree of centralization de...

This paper examines the impact of the risk-based capital (RBC) requirements on bank cost efficiencies. We take into consideration both onand off-balance sheet (OBS) products and allow product mixes to differ across banks and to vary over time. Our empirical results suggest that the cost structures of large banks are significantly different during the pre-RBC and post-RBC periods. That is, the R...

Like many financial contracts, derivatives are subject to default risk. A very popular mechanism in derivatives markets to mitigate the risk of non-performance on contracts is margining. By attaching collateral to a contract, margining supposedly reduces default risk. The broader impacts of the different types of margins are more ambiguous, however. In this paper we develop both, a theoretical ...

We investigate bank holding companies’ window dressing of quarter-end short-term borrowings. We find evidence of downward window dressing of short-term borrowings through repo and federal funds that appears material for a large fraction of the sample. Such downward window dressing is more pronounced at banks with higher leverage, lower capital adequacy ratios, and greater management compensatio...

This study estimates cost efficiency, scale economies, technological progress and productivity growth for Indonesian banks over the period 1993-2000. Overall the cost efficiency of all banks during this period was 69.82%. However, on average the efficiency of banks prior to the Asian crisis and after the Asian crisis were 79.67% and 53.40% respectively. Moreover, the results also indicate that ...