Our study of 602 European banks over 1996-2002 investigates how the banks' expansion into fee-based services has affected their interest margins and loan pricing. We find that higher income share from commissions and fees is associated with lower margins and loan spreads. The higher the...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between bank risk and product diversification in the changing structure of the European banking industry. Based on a broad set of European banks for the period 1996-2002, our study first shows that banks expanding into non-interest...

This paper focuses on efficiency measures of banks from six countries in East Asia. We use a two-stage approach to study the post-crisis period 1999-2004. We first estimate technical efficiencies using Data Envelopment Analysis and test for cross country differences. Efficiency scores are...

The main objective of this paper is to empirically assess the issue of asymmetric information in banking within a framework based on the behavior of bank stock prices. Following an event-study methodology for a sample of European listed banks during the Asian and Russian crises of 1997 and 1998,...

This paper focuses on efficiency measures of banks from six countries in East Asia. We use a two-stage approach to study the post-crisis period 1999-2004. We first estimate technical efficiencies using Data Envelopment Analysis and test for cross country differences. Efficiency scores are...

This paper assesses the implications on bank interest margins of the expansion into non-traditional fee-based activities in European banking. We use a sample of 602 European commercial and cooperative banks from 1996 to 2002 and consider the total income shares of trading income and commission...

We empirically investigate whether a bank's decision to recapitalize is influenced by the separation between voting and cash-flow rights of the ultimate owner. We use a novel dataset on bank ultimate control and ownership structure of 442 European commercial banks to estimate an...

Using detailed ownership data for a sample of European commercial banks, we analyze the link between ownership structure and risk in both privately owned and publicly held banks. We consider five categories of shareholders (managers/directors, institutional investors, non-financial companies,...

We investigate whether excess control rights of ultimate owners in pyramids affect banks' adjustment to their target capital ratio. When ultimate control rights and cash-flow rights are identical, banks increase their capital ratio by issuing equity and by reshuffling their assets without...

We investigate whether excess control rights of ultimate owners in pyramids affect banks' capital ratio adjustments. When control and cash-flow rights are identical, to boost capital ratios banks issue equity without cutting lending. However, when control rights exceed cash-flow rights, instead...