Using both market-based and annual report-based approaches to measure lending specialization for a broad cross-section of banks and countries over the period 2002 to 2011, this paper is the first to empirically gauge the relationship between bank lending specialization and bank performance and...

Using data from a survey of 91 banks in 45 countries, the authors characterize bank financing to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) around the world. They find that banks perceive the SME segment to be highly profitable, but perceive macroeconomic instability in developing countries and...

While the theoretical and empirical finance literature has focused almost exclusively on enterprise credit, about half of credit extended by banks to the private sector in a sample of 45 developing and developed countries is to households. The share of household credit in total credit increases...

We study the conditions that ensure rational expectations equilibrium (REE) determinacy and expectational stability (E-stability) in a standard sticky-price model augmented with the cost channel. We allow for varying degrees of pass-through of the policy rate to bank-lending rates. Strong...

This paper examines the behavior of the finance premium after technology and monetary shocks in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model where borrowers use a fraction of their production (output) as collateral. We show that this simple framework is capable of producing a...