We study whether bank efficiency is related to bank ownership in Russia. We find that foreign banks are more efficient than domestic private banks and – surprisingly – that domestic private banks are not more efficient than domestic public banks. These results are not driven by the choice of...

This paper aims at testing empirically the three major theoretical reasons why banks resort to collateral: reduction of loan loss in the event of default, adverse selection, and moral hazard. This investigation is performed by testing whether the reasons vary according to the type of collateral....

We investigate whether collateral helps to solve adverse selection problems. Theory predicts a negative relationship between presence of collateral and risk premium, as collateral constitutes a signalling instrument for the borrower to be charged with a lower risk premium. However, bankers’...

There has been a considerable expansion of the volume of syndicated loans in emerging markets in the recent years. We provide the first analysis of the determinants of the decision of banks to syndicate a loan on a sample of loan facilities from 50 emerging countries. We show the significant...

We investigate the impact of bank competition on the use of collateral in loan contracts. We develop a theoretical model incorporating information asymmetries in a spatial competition framework where banks choose between screening the borrower and asking for collateral. We show that the presence...

The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of corruption on bank lending in Russia. This issue is of major interest in order to understand the causes of financial underdevelopment and the effects of corruption in Russia. We use regional measures of corruption and bank-level data to...

This article investigates the impact of legal environment on the relationship between leverage and auditor choice in 10 European countries. We demonstrate that the relationship between the choice of a high-quality auditor and firm leverage varies significantly across countries. This finding...

We test the relationship between governance and macroeconomic technical efficiency on a sample of 62 countries, both developed and developing. We do so by applying Battese and Coelli (1995)’s method at the aggregate level. We find that better governance, measured by six complementary indices...

A large number of bank failures occurred in transition countries during the 1990s and at the beginning of the 2000s. These were related to increases in non-performing loans and deteriorated cost efficiency of banks. This paper addresses the question of the causality between non-performing loans...