The current crisis raises the question whether loans to SMEs in emerging markets are inherently more risky. We use a unique unbalanced panel of nearly 700 loans made to SMEs in Slovakia between 2000 and 2005. Several probit and panel probit models show that liquidity and profitability factors...

The current economic policy discussion on financial integration in the European Union concentrates on cross-border mergers. We study the impact of cross-border lending in a theoretical model where banks acquire either hard or soft information on borrowing firms and predict that the closer firms...

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...