This paper examines the political influence on government bank lending decisions using the prefecture level panel data on Japan’s government loans from 1975 to 1992. I find that prefectures that were represented by more influential members of the ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), tended to receive more government loans. I also find that the amount of government loans tended to i...

Student Loans Repayment and Recovery: International Comparisons Student loans schemes are in operation in more than seventy countries around the world. Most loans schemes benefit from sizeable built-in government subsidies and, in addition, are subject to repayment default and administrative costs that are not passed on to student borrowers. We probe two issues in this paper, for 44 loans schem...

This paper examines the reporting of bank loans in the financial press during the 2004-2007 period. More specifically, it uses a unique hand-collected data set to examine the frequency and determinants of loan reporting. The motivation is double folded. First, virtually all publicly traded firms borrow from banks. However, despite their widespread use, the reporting of bank loan agreements in t...

Purpose This paper investigates the effect of financial development on bank profitability. The authors examine whether is an important determinant Design/methodology/approach ordinary least square and generalized method moments regression methods were used to analyze impact profitability Nigerian banking sector. Findings find a significant negative relationship between system deposits GDP ratio...

An encompassing model of a business loan contract with the bank is constructed to establish the roles and relative importance of asymmetry of information, market power, borrower (entrepreneurial) effort and quality in explaining contract features. Special cases of the model include symmetric versus asymmetric information regimes, competition versus monopoly power, adverse selection versus moral...

This article reviews recent developments in the US and UK in response to rising foreclosures, with an emphasis on the provision of advice or counseling to borrowers in mortgage default. Both nations have increased support for counseling programs despite the lack of evidence that counseling is effective. Based on a quantitative study in the US and a qualitative study in the UK, this article prov...

Microfinance loans have expanded greatly in the recent years as a way of helping the poor gain cheaper loans, but percentage take-up of microcredit has remained lower than expectations. In an attempt to explain this phenomenon, this paper uses a randomized evaluation of the impact of introducing microfinance loans in a new urban setting in Hyderabad, India, to determine if lack of flexibility i...

We examine whether stringent formal sector borrowing requirements in developing countries restrict credit access and the potential of asset-collateralized loans. When a Kenyan dairy cooperative exogenously replaced high down payments with loans collateralized by the asset itself a large water tank loan take-up increased from 2.4% to 41.9%. In contrast, substituting joint liability requirements ...