This paper analyzes whether the political connections of listed firms in the United States affect the cost and terms of loan contracts. Using a hand-collected data set of the political connections of S&P 500 companies over the 2003-2008 time period, we find that the cost of bank loans is...

The recent global financial crisis has spurred renewed interest in identifying those reforms in bank regulation that would work best to promote bank development, performance and stability. Building upon three recent world-wide surveys on bank regulation (Barth et al., 2004, 2006, and 2008), we...

This paper analyzes whether the political connections of listed firms in the United States affect the cost and terms of loan contracts. Using a hand-collected data set of the political connections of S&P 500 companies over the 2003-2008 time period, we find that the cost of bank loans is...

The global financial crisis in 2008-09 has caused great turmoil in the banking sectors of the developed world. As a result, the importance of banks from developing economies, represented by BRIC banks, in the global banking market is rising. This paper investigates bank performance and its...

This paper examines the relation between corporate ownership structure and bank loan syndicate structure. We find that the divergence between control rights and cash-flow rights of a borrowing firm's largest ultimate owner has a significant impact on the concentration and composition of the...

We propose a unified framework to study liquidity provision by debt-issuing versus equity-issuing financial intermediaries. We show that both types of intermediaries provide liquidity by insuring against idiosyncratic liquidity risks as in Diamond and Dybvig (1983) but with distinct frictions....