Using a novel way to identify relationship and transaction banks, we study how banks’ lending techniques affect funding to SMEs over the business cycle. For 21 countries we link the lending techniques that banks use in the direct vicinity of firms to these firms’ credit constraints at two...

After Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in September 2008, cross-border bank lending contracted sharply. To explain the severity and variation in this contraction, we analyze detailed data on cross-border syndicated lending by 75 banks to 59 countries. We find that banks which had to write...

We use loan-level data to examine how large international banks reduced their cross-border lending after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Country, firm, and bank fixed effects allow us to disentangle credit supply and demand and to simultaneously control for the unobserved traits of banks and...

We use loan-level data to examine how large international banks reduced their cross-border lending after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Country, firm, and bank fixed effects allow us to disentangle credit supply and demand and to simultaneously control for the unobserved traits of banks and...

Financial systems all over the world have grown dramatically over recent decades. But is more finance necessarily better? And what concept of financial system – a focus on its size, including both intermediation and other auxiliary “non-intermediation” activities, or a focus on traditional...

Statistics show that the sale of goods on credit is widespread among firms even when they are capital constrained and thus face relatively high costs in providing trade credit. This study provides an explanation for this by arguing that customers who possess strong market power are able to...