The recent financial crisis has reopened the debate on the impact of informal and formal finance on firm growth in developing countries. Using unique survey data, we find that informal finance is associated with higher sales growth for small firms and lower sales growth for large firms. We...

Is bank- versus market-based financing different in its attitudes towards Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) risk? Using a novel sample covering 3,783 U.S. public firms from 2007 to 2020, we study how firm-level ESG risk affects its financing outcomes. We find that companies with higher...

​Who gains from inter-corporate credit? To answer this question we investigate the reactions of the stock prices of both the issuing and receiving firms to the announcements of 719 inter-corporate loans that took place between 2005 and 2012 in China. We find that the average abnormal return...

Modern banking institutions were virtually non-existent in the planned economies of central Europe and the former Soviet Union. In the early transition period, banking sectors began to develop during several years of macroeconomic decline and turbulence accompanied by repeated bank crises....

​Trust in banks is considered essential for an effective financial system, yet little is known about what determines trust in banks. Only a handful of single-country studies discuss the topic, so this paper aims to fill the gap by providing a cross-country analysis on the level and...

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...

Modern banking institutions were virtually non-existent in the planned economies of central Europe and the former Soviet Union. In the early transition period, banking sectors began to develop during several years of macroeconomic decline and turbulence accompanied by repeated bank crises....

This study investigates the relationship between politically connected firms and their access to bank financing in a post-communist eras in Poland. Overall, it finds that “recent” political connections do influence access to bank financing and the value of such connections increased during...

​The dynamic banking reforms of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) following the collapse of the Soviet Union provide an ideal research setting for examining the causal effect of institutional development on financial reporting. Using five earnings quality measures, we consistently find that...

The paper analyzes the experiences and developments of Hungarian banking sector during the transitional process from a centralized economy to a market-oriented system. The paper identifies that early reorganization initiatives, flexible approaches to privatization, and liberal policies towards...