This paper studies strategies pursued by banks in order to differentiate their services and soften competition. More specifically we analyse whether bank's ability to avoid losses, its capital ratio, or bank size can be used as strategic variables to make banks different and increase the...

We introduce a model analyzing how asymmetric information problems in a bank-loan market may evolve over the age of a borrowing firm. The model predicts a life-cycle pattern for banks' interest rate markup. Young firms pay a low or negative markup, thereafter the markup increases until it falls...

We derive empirical implications from a stylized theoretical model of bankborrower relationships. Banks' interest rate markups are predicted to follow a life-cycle pattern over the borrowing firms' age. Due to endogenous bank monitoring by competing banks, borrowing firms initially face a low...

Firms choose debt structure and competing banks choose monitoring intensity. Monitoring improves credit allocation, but creates informational lock-in effects in bank-borrower relationships. In a competitive credit market, banks dissipate anticipated profit from serving locked-in borrowers...

This paper demonstrates the importance of using a flexible cost function specification when analyzing economies of scale and estimating the cost effect of banking mergers. The inflexibility of the translog cost function is illustrated and results are compared to more flexible spline and Fourier...

Stakeholder oriented governance systems are often thought to hamper efficiency. We show that social capital improves the viability of stakeholder-oriented firms in competitive markets. Studying exits from the population of Norwegian savings banks after deregulations, we find that banks located...

How does the management and resolution of the current crisis compare with the response of the Nordic countries in the early 1990s, widely regarded as exemplary? We argue that, while intervention has been prompter, the measures taken so far remain less comprehensive and in-depth. In particular,...

We analyze the effect of mergers on various aspects of airline performance during the period 1970-84, using a panel data set constructed by Caves et al. Estimates derived from a simple "matched pairs" statistical model indicate that these mergers were associated with reductions in unit cost. The...