We survey the extant literature on the effects of both a bank's organizational structure and the physical distance separating it from the lender on lending decisions. Banks do engage in spatial pricing, where the underlying mechanism can be both transportation costs and information asymmetries....

We employ a unique data set containing bank-specific information to explore how foreign bank entry determines credit allocation in emerging markets. We investigate the impact of the mode of foreign entry (greenfield or takeover) on banks' portfolio allocation to borrowers with different degrees...

Two important characteristics of current equity markets are the large number of competing trading venues with publicly displayed order books and the substantial fraction of dark trading, which takes place outside such visible order books. This paper evaluates the impact on liquidity of dark...

We study the competitive and welfare consequences when only one firm must commit to uniform pricing while the competitor's pricing policy is left unconstrained. The asymmetric no-discrimination constraint prohibits both behavior-based price discrimination within the competitive segment and...

This paper provides evidence on the relationship between finance and growth in a fast growing country, such as China. Employing data of 27 Chinese provinces over the period 1995-2003, we study whether the financial development of two different types of institutions - banks and non-bank financial...

Integrated financial markets provide opportunities for expansion and improved risk sharing, but also pose threats of contagion risk through cross-border exposures. This paper examines cross-border contagion risk over the period 1999-2006. To that purpose we use aggregate cross-border exposures...

When new technologies become available, it is not only essential that firms have the correct investment incentives, but often also that consumers make the proper usage decisions. This paper studies investment and usage in a shared ATM network. Because all banks coordinate their ATM investment...

A debtor-friendly personal bankruptcy regime reallocates credit by reducing its availability, particularly for low-asset individuals. We show that increasing the amount of asset protection in bankruptcy leads to higher income inequality. The rise in inequality is amplified in industries with...

Firms' innovative activities can be sensitive to public policies that affect the availability of capital for risky projects. In this paper, we investigate the effects of regional and temporal variation in U.S. personal bankruptcy laws on firms' innovative activities. We find bankruptcy laws that...

We investigate how political uncertainty affects the geographic distribution of bank lending to small businesses. Using exogenous variation in gubernatorial elections with binding term limits, we show that political uncertainty causes local banks to increase out-of-state lending to small firms,...