This paper analyzes costly favoritism related to physical attractiveness and gender in bank loan markets using a market structure-based method. The rationale is that a concentrated market provides more space for loan officers to discriminate against a certain group of borrowers. Using several...

How do banks react to increased interbank competition? Recent banking theory offers conflicting predictions about the impact of competition on bank orientation - i.e., the choice of relationship based versus transactional banking - and bank industry specialization. We empirically investigate the...

An extensive empirical literature has documented the positive growth effects of equity market liberalization. However, this line of research ignores the impact of financial integration on a category of firms crucial for economic development, i.e. the small entrepreneurial firms. This paper aims...