Credit channel as a channel of influence of financial factors on the real economy has been an intensive subject of both theoretical and empirical research during the last twenty years. Leena Morttinen's doctoral dissertation deals with several topics in this area. The first essay studies the...

Transparency regulation aims at reducing financial fragility by strengthening market discipline. There are however two elementary properties of banking that may render such regulation detrimental. First, an extensive financial safety net may eliminate the disciplinary effect of transparency...

Bank regulation is a basic theme in this dissertation. More extensively, the dissertation focuses on bank panics, deposit insurance and on problems in bank-depositor relationships.

We address the question of how lending market competition, measured by the bargaining power of banks, affects the agency costs of debt finance. It is shown that intensified lending market competition will lead to lower lending rates and investment return distributions which are shifted towards...