I study whether a firm’s environmental profile affects the cost of its bank loans. I find that firms with environmental concerns such as hazardous waste concern, substantial toxic chemical emission concern and climate change concern pay a higher interest rate on their bank loans. Firms that derive substantial revenue from environmentally beneficial products pay a lower interest rate on their ba...

This paper estimates the relationship between banking market concentration and high-risk portfolio strategies at commercial banks. I use the unprecedented changes in the degree of competition in local banking markets that occurred after 1980 to estimate the impact of market competition on the risk profile of commercial bank lending. I find evidence that increasing concentration has been associa...

Before the credit crisis that started in mid-2007, it was generally believed by top regulators that credit derivatives make banks sounder. In this paper, we investigate the validity of this view. We examine the use of credit derivatives by US bank holding companies with assets in excess of one billion dollars from 1999 to 2005. Using the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Bank Holding Company Data...

Given current concerns on foreign currency exposures in emerging economies, we examine the currency denomination of bank loans. We compare the currency requested by borrowers and the currency decision subsequently made by a bank in Bulgaria prior to the current crisis. We analyze more than hundred thousand loans to sixty thousand different firms granted during the period 2003-2007. We relate th...

We assess the competitiveness of the $400 billion dollar U.S. bank consumer loan market by comparing results from different competition measures–HHI, Lerner Index, H-Statistic along with three others, two of which are related to frontier analysis. These measures are typically weakly related to one another and only half of them identify banks with the highest loan price and spread as also being ...

This paper hypothesizes that the special role of banks as corporate quasi-insiders has been changing due to developments in informational, legal and institutional infrastructures of syndicated loan markets. We investigate the integration of intermediated and disintermediated financial markets through highly leveraged transaction (HLT) syndicated loans during the 1990s. We demonstrate that, with...

A lot of confusion and misunderstanding has been created by several commentators on the issue of non-performing loans (NPLs) of banking system. They take the absolute amount of such loans at the current point of time and compare it with the quantum of such loans in October 1999 and make a hue and cry that the situation has deteriorated because the quantum of NPLs has gone up. Such a simplistic ...