State-owned banks tend to increase lending before elections for the purpose of boosting the re-election odds of incumbent politicians. We employ monthly data on individual banks to study whether Russian banks increased their lending before presidential elections during 2004-2019, a period...

There has been a notable debate in the banking literature on the impact of bank competition on financial stability. While the dominant view sees a detrimental impact of competition on the stability of banks, this view has recently been challenged by Boyd and De Nicolo (2005) who see the reverse...

We investigate whether lending by the dominant Russian state bank, Sberbank, contributed to Vladimir Putin's ascent to power during the presidential elections of March 2000. Our hypothesis is that Sberbank corporate loans could have been used as incentives for managers at private firms to...

We formulate the “High Liquidity Creation Hypothesis” (HLCH) that a proliferation in the core activity of bank liquidity creation increases failure probability. We test the HLCH in the context of Russian banking, which provides a natural field experiment due to numerous failures experienced...

This study examines the relationship between bank transparency and efficiency. Using a unique dataset for Russian banks, we find that transparency is important and that, among the dimensions of transparency, the transparency in board and management structure and process represents the most...

This study examines how bank ownership influenced the credit supply during the recent financial crisis in Russia, where the banking sector consists of a mix of state-controlled banks, foreign-owned banks, and domestic private banks. To estimate credit supply changes, we employ an exhaustive...

This paper considers whether local bank participation exerts an impact on the spreads for syndicated loans in Russia. Following Berger, Klapper and Udell (2001), we test whether local banks possess a superior ability to deal with information asymmetries. Using a sample of 528 syndicated loans to...

The aim of this paper is to analyze bank competition in Russia by measuring the market power of Russian banks and its determinants over the period 2001-2007 with the Lerner index. Earlier studies on bank competition have focused on developed countries whereas this paper contributes to the...

This study examines how bank ownership influenced the credit supply during the recent financial crisis in Russia, where the banking sector consists of a mix of state-controlled banks, foreign-owned banks, and domestic private banks. To estimate credit supply changes, we employ an exhaustive...