This paper studies the links between competition in the lending market and spreads of bank loans in Brazil. Evidence from a dataset of more than 13 million loan-level observations from private banks shows a positive relationship between market power, measured by the Lerner index, and the cost of...

The study assesses whether incorporating macroeconomic variables and characteristics of the credit portfolio improves the specification of models designed to identify management discretion in making loan loss provisions by banks, considering the norms issued by regulatory agencies. The empirical...