"Under the traditional "competition-fragility" view, more bank competition erodes market power, decreases profit margins, and results in reduced franchise value that encourages bank risk taking. Under the alternative "competition-stability" view, more market power in the loan market may result...

Large and foreign-owned institutions may have difficulty extending relationship loans to informationally opaque small firms. Bank distress does not appear to affect small business lending, although even small firms may react to bank distress by borrowing from multiple banks

This paper investigates the effects of focus versus diversification on bank performance using data on Chinese banks during the 1996-2006 period. We construct a new measure, economies of diversification, and compare the results to those of the more conventional focus indices, which are based on...

China is reforming its banking system, partially privatizing and taking on minority foreign ownership of three of its dominant "Big Four" state-owned banks. This paper helps predict the effects by analyzing the efficiency of Chinese banks over 1994-2003. Findings suggest that Big Four banks are...

The authors use panel data on the number of new firm registrations in 92 countries to study how the magnitude of reforms affects new firm registrations. They find that small reforms, in general less than 40 percent reduction in costs, days, or procedures required for business registration, do...

The authors employ a novel dataset on almost 30,000 trade credit contracts to describe the broad characteristics of the parties that contract together; the key contractual terms, such as the discount for early payment; and the days by when payment is due. Whereas prior work has typically used...

The authors examine the association of financial literacy with retirement planning in Russia, a country with a relatively old and rapidly aging population, large regional disparities, and a rapidly emerging financial market. They find that only 36.3 percent of respondents in the sample...