A large literature on the effects of bank consolidation focuses on direct efficiency gains for participating banks and market power effects. The special nature of credit markets suggests that indirect informational effects for borrowers may be generated by bank consolidation. In particular, borrowers that depend on relationship-based lending may face a reduction in credit availability because s...

Credit risk scoring has gone a long way since Fair Isaac introduced the first commercial scorecard to assist banks in making their credit lending decisions over 50 years ago. It now becomes the cornerstone in modern credit risk management thanks to the advancement in computing technologies and availability of affordable computing power. Credit scoring is no longer only applied in assessing lend...

This paper models a developing nation that faces a foreign exchange shortage and hence its demand for foreign goods is limited both by its income and its foreign exchange balance. Availability of international credit relaxes the second constraint. It is shown that in this setting the availability of intemational credit at concessionary rates can leave the borrowing nation worse off than if it h...

The objective of the present research is to study consumer decisions to utilize a line of credit. The life-cycle hypothesis from economics argues that consumers should intertemporally reallocate their incomes over their life stream to maximize lifetime utility. One form of intertemporal allocation is to use past income (in the form of savings) in the future. A second form is the use of future i...

Other papers presented at this conference have documented the substantial recent decline in real estate prices and the impact of this decline on financial institutions. This paper will take the decline in bank capital as a result of exposure to real estate as given, and address how banks have responded to their deteriorated financial condition. The paper will show that real estate losses, combi...

Increased availability of temptation goods might harm individuals if they have time-inconsistent preferences and consume more in the present than planned before. We study this idea by examining the credit behavior of low-income households around the expansion of the opening hours of retail liquor stores during a nationwide experiment in Sweden. Consistent with store closures serving as commitme...

This paper examines the effectiveness of Japan’s Emergency Credit Guarantee (ECG) program set up during the financial turmoil following the failure of Lehman Brothers, in increasing credit availability and improving the ex-post performance of small businesses. In particular, using a unique firm-bank matched dataset, the paper examines whether lending relationships enhanced or dampened the effec...