Credit markets in many Eastern European countries are now dominated by foreign-owned banks. We analyze the development for foreign ownership and its impact on lending rate in ten Eastern European countries between 1995 and 2003. Currently, the majority of loans from foreign banks is granted by...

Banks entering an emerging market face a lot of uncertainty about the risks involved in lending. We use a unique unbalanced panel of nearly 700 short-term loans made to SMEs in Slovakia between January 2000 and June 2005. Of the loans granted, on average 6.0 per cent of the firms defaulted....

Banks entering an emerging market face a lot of uncertainty about the risks involved in lending. We use a unique unbalanced panel of nearly 700 shortterm loans made to SMEs in Slovakia between January 2000 and June 2005. Of the loans granted, on average 6.0 per cent of the firms defaulted....

Credit markets in many Eastern European countries are now dominated by foreign-owned banks. We analyze the development for foreign ownership and its impact on lending rate in ten Eastern European countries between 1995 and 2003. Currently, the majority of loans from foreign banks is granted by...

Banks entering an emerging market face a lot of uncertainty about the risks involved in lending. We use a unique unbalanced panel of nearly 700 short-term loans made to SMEs in Slovakia between January 2000 and June 2005. Of the loans granted, on average 6.0 per cent of the firms defaulted....

Financial markets in emerging economies are often perceived as more risky than those in developed countries. We investigate whether this is true for loans to SMEs using a unique unbalanced panel of nearly 700 loans made to SMEs in Slovakia between 2000 and 2005. Several probit and panel probit...

The current economic policy discussion on financial integration in the European Union concentrates on cross-border mergers. We study the impact of cross-border lending in a theoretical model where banks acquire either hard or soft information on borrowing firms and predict that the closer firms...