We investigate the determinants of the banks' propensity to make long-term business loans in an emerging market context. Using a large sample of Russian banks, we find that the median bank allocates only 0.5% of its assets in long-term business loans and that there is wide cross-sectional...

Robust estimation techniques based on symmetric probability distributions are often substituted for OLS to obtain efficient regression parameters with thick-tail distributed data. The empirical, simulation and theoretical results in this paper show that with skewed distributed data, symmetric...