Deteriorating public finances around the world raise doubts about countries’ abilities to bail out their largest banks. For an international sample of banks, this paper investigates the impact of government indebtedness and deficits on bank stock prices and CDS spreads. Overall, bank stock...

The Riegle-Neal Act in the US and the Economic and Monetary Union in Europe are recent initiatives to stimulate financial integration.These initiatives allow new entrants to "poach" the incumbents' clients by offering them attractive loan offers.We show that these deregulations may be...

Abstract: This paper documents large cross-country variation in the relationship between bank competition and bank stability and explores market, regulatory and institutional features that can explain this variation. We show that an increase in competition will have a larger impact on banks’...

In 2001, government guarantees for savings banks in Germany were removed following a law suit. We use this natural experiment to examine the effect of government guarantees on bank risk taking, using a large data set of matched bank/borrower information. The results suggest that banks whose...

We show that competing firms relax overall competition by lowering future barriers to entry.We illustrate our findings in a two-period model with adverse selection where banks strategically commit to disclose borrower information.By doing this, they invite rivals to enter their market.Disclosure...

Motivated by current concerns over foreign currency exposures in emerging economies, we examine the currency denomination of business loans made in Bulgaria prior to the current crisis. We analyze information on the requested and granted currency for more than hundred thousand loans granted by...

We examine how relational contracting in credit and investment relationships is affected by the potential expropriation of funds. We implement credit relationships in which repayment is not third-party enforceable, i.e. borrowers can default on their loans. In our main treatment the borrower can...