This paper investigates how a firm’s borrowing cost evolves as it ages. Using a new data set of more than 200,000 bank-dependent small firms for 1997-2002, we find the following. First, the distribution of borrowing costs tends to become less skewed to the right over time, which can be partially attributed to “selection” (i.e., exits of defaulting firms reduce the total borrowing costs), but is...

We analyze the risk implications of European bank consolidation on the probability of default of acquiring banks. Using the Merton distance to default model, we show that the average bank merger is risk neutral. We examine the extent to which merger motives linked to risk diversification and regulatory incentives explain the observed risk effects of M&A. However, we find only limited evidence c...

External finance is critical for less established entrepreneurs, so poor investor protection can hinder competition. We model how lobbying for weaker investor protection reduces access to finance and decreases competition in countries where politicians are less accountable to voters. Weaker accountability thus produces a smaller economic elite. As empirical support for this result, in a broad p...

This study examines bank risk by investigating the equity and loan portfolio characteristics of publicly-traded bank holding companies. Unlike the pattern for non-financial firms, equity betas of large banks are two to five times greater than those of small banks. In explaining this, we note that regulation imposes an effective cap on banks’ equity volatility. Because the portfolios of small ba...

This paper provides a compact framework for banking regulation analysis in the presence of uncertainty between systemic liquidity and solvency shocks. Extending the work by Cao & Illing (2009a, b), it is shown that systemic liquidity shortage arises endogenously as part of the inferior mixed strategy equilibrium. The paper compares different traditional regulatory policies which intend to fix t...

The goal of this paper is to improve our understanding of the costs and benefits of explicit deposit insurance. To this end, we compare the opportunity-cost value of deposit insurance services for a large sample of banks drawn from countries with or without explicit deposit insurance. After correcting for certain bankand country-specific factors, we find that the existence of explicit deposit i...

Currently, Eurodollars and fed funds markets combined trade about $220 billion in funds daily, the vast majority of which with overnight tenor. In this paper, we document several features of these wholesale unsecured dollar funding markets. Using daily confidential data on wholesale unsecured borrowing and reserve balances, we show that foreign banks, which make up most of the trading volumes i...

Article history: Received 11 December 2008 Received in revised form 25 August 2009 Accepted 21 September 2009 Available online 15 October 2009 Using data from prewar Japan, this paper investigates the impact of a liquidity shock induced by depositors' behavior on bank portfolio management during financial crises in a system lacking deposit insurance. It is found that banks reacted to the liquid...

This paper aims to examine the major financial flows between non-financial enterprises outside the budget sector and other sectors of the Bulgarian economy, in particular the financial sector and the government budget, as well as the financial flows within the enterprise sector itself during the crisis period in 1996–97. In doing so, we shall answer the question of whether or not the real secto...

In this paper the principal-agent models between the investor and the manager of the open-ended fund are made from the new view about the liquidity risk management, and the optimal contracts and optimal policies are obtained in closed form by solving these modes. By the analysis of the optimal contract, we find that the fixed compensation of manager is the positive relationship with redemption ...