One of the most important risks faced by a bank is that of loan default by its borrowers. Existing literature has documented the negative announcement-period returns for lending banks when a big sovereign borrower announces a moratorium on its bank loans. In contrast, little research has been undertaken that analyzes bank shareholder wealth effects when a major corporate borrower declares defau...

*The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia or the Federal Reserve System. 1 Most observers view the expansion of high-risk mortgage loans between 2004 and 2006 as a particularly dramatic example of a widespread decline in lending standards. While the research on this episode is expanding rapidly, the e...

T he lending activity of commercial banks has long received considerable attention as an important contributor to the performance of the economy. This attention has, perhaps, become sharper in the wake of the difficulties experienced by the banking industry in the 1980s. In recent years, the public perception of bank lending seems to have swung through a cycle. In the early 1990s, the prevailin...

Banks may well perform differently in lending to firms according to their funding structure. This paper surveys the relation between Loan volatility and deposit in Iranian banking system. The extent to which bank lending is connected to funding structure is affected by the banks’ characteristics (such as capital structure, profitability, and the measure of non-performing loans). To analyze this...

We show real effects of financial reporting transparency on the domestic banking sector. Transparent financial reporting facilitates non-financial firms’ access to arm’s-length financing from external capital markets and foreign banks. This diminishes non-financial firms’ reliance on domestic banks for their financial services. Domestic banks thus face increased competition from the alternate p...

2 Introduction 3 1. The Bank Lending Channel 4 1.1 Interest Rate and Credit Channels: a Brief Overview of Theoretical Concepts 4 1.2 Determinants of the Bank Lending Channel 6 2. A Short Description of Latvia's Banking Sector 7 2.1 Importance of the Banking Sector for Latvia's Financial System 7 2.2 Structure of Latvia's Banking Sector 8 3. Discovering Asymmetries in Bank Lending Behaviour 12 3...

This paper discusses conventional and unconventional monetary policies in a dynamic small open economy model with financial frictions. In the model, financial intermediaries or banks borrow from the world market and lend to domestic households. The external debt of banks is limited by a multiple of their equity; in turn, households hold equity in banks subject to a limit, reflecting domestic fr...

Based on survey data from 193 banks in 20 countries we provide the first bank-level analysis of the determinants of foreign currency (FX) lending in emerging Europe. We find that FX lending by all banks, regardless of their ownership structure, is strongly determined by the macroeconomic environment. We find no evidence of foreign banks ‘pushing’ FX loans indiscriminately because of easier acce...

This paper examines the association between bank debt maturity and relationship lending using a unique survey sample of 3,366 SMEs from 19 European countries. The knowledge of how the institutional environment shapes relationship lending helps us to understand how current institutional changes, such as Basel II, might affect the SME-bank relationship and hence, SME access to financing. Our resu...

With bank-level data from 81 developing countries, the paper shows that increased foreign bank presence is associated with increased reliance on non-deposit based funding, which leads to higher interest rate spreads, less credit to the private sector, and higher volatility in bank loans. Foreign bank entry significantly reduces domestic banks’ share of deposits while foreign banks typically all...