What is the magnitude of credit constraint or credit gap affecting small businesses? This paper provides estimates of credit gap, defined as the difference between the desired and actual levels of debt for credit-constrained small businesses using the data from the National Survey of Small Business Finances. The estimated credit gap is approximately 20 percent – credit constrained small busines...

Do commercial banks invest less in information gathering activity when they compete more aggressively with each other? Does intensifying competitive pressure in bank loan markets affect the quality of informational ties that bind borrowers and lending banks? Using survey data from German manufacturing firms, we are able to directly measure information flows from loan applicants to banks. We fin...

The severity of banking crises increases with disinformation about the losses banks incur in making politically directed loans and about the budgetary costs to the government of standing ready to absorb these losses increases. When (as it eventually must) such disinformation begins to lose credibility, silent runs test the government’s commitment to supporting its insolvent banks. An open banki...

We investigate differences in the characteristics and performance of securitized loans versus loans held on lenders’ balance sheets using a unique data set of commercial mort­ gages. The main findings are as follows. First, consistent with risk-sharing being a likely reason for securitization, loan size strongly predicts the likelihood of securiti­ zation. The largest 10% of loans have a 44% ch...

We show that investors derive utility from non-pecuniary characteristics of investments by studying impact funds, defined as venture or growth equity funds with dual objectives of generating financial returns and positive externalities. Impact funds earn internal rates of return that are 4.7% less than traditional VC funds in reduced form regressions. Based on estimates of a willingness to pay ...

Employing compensation data provided by 63 banks from 16 European countries for the period from 2000 to 2010 this paper empirically investigates the impact of excess variable compensation on bank risk. As a main finding, we provide evidence for a risk-increasing impact of excess variable pay for both executive variable cash-based and variable equity-based compensation. This baseline finding hol...

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 scarce. Moreover, bank strategy has not previously been accounted for. Hence, this paper presents nov...

In this paper we develop a two-step survival time approach – a discrete logit model with survival time dummies – that allows for time-varying explanatory variables and interval censored data. Our empirical analysis reveals that the twostep approach outperforms the benchmark logit model with respect to out-ofsample prediction accuracy. Survival time, however, does not play an important role. The...

This paper adopts a contingent-claim valuation framework to investigate the role of subordinated debt in alleviating the moral hazard problem in banking and providing the regulator with the information on the risk of bank assets. The incorporation of bankruptcy cost in the framework of the analysis provides some new evidence about the potential role of subordinated debt. The extent of market di...

The Indian and Pakistani banking industry is said to have an excessive use of labour due to the significant market share of government owned banks. Both countries have undertaken a process of regulatory reform to bring about market discipline in the usage of inputs and to increase the labour use efficiency and productivity. The focus of this paper is the estimation of productivity and efficienc...