Micro-lending has been introduced as an effective antipoverty tool in recent decades. However not all of micro-lending institutes are successful both in accomplishing their mission and in loan recovery. According to World Bank’s focus note (2006), less than a quarter of its projects that funded micro-lending were judged successful. This paper describes a specific type of micro-lending (Grameen ...

Credit derivatives are the latest in a series of innovations that have had a significant impact on credit markets. Using a micro data set of individual corporate loans, this paper explores whether use of credit derivatives is associated with an increase in bank credit supply. We find evidence that greater use of credit derivatives is associated with greater supply of bank credit for large term ...

VAR analysis on a measure of bank lending standards collected by the Federal Reserve reveals that shocks to lending standards are significantly correlated with innovations in commercial loans at banks and in real output. Credit standards strongly dominate loan rates in explaining variation in business loans and output. Standards remain significant when we include various proxies for loan demand...

Bank loan syndications have become an increasingly popular and important way for commercial borrowers to satisfy their financing needs. The ability to overcome problems of adverse selection and moral hazard are critical to the development of this market. Using a panel data set constructed from the Shared National Credit Program over the period 1995 to 1999, this paper extends the work of Simons...

A long standing macroeconomic issue is how monetary policy a ects the real economy The lending view is that tight money a ects aggregate demand by shifting the supply schedule left in the bank loan market Previous studies have found that loans contract following tight money It is not clear whether the nancial contraction re ects a shift of the supply schedule or the demand schedule in the loan ...

Abstract A long-standing macroeconomic issue is how monetary policy affects the real economy. The lending view is that tight money affects aggregate demand by shifting the supply schedule left in the bank loan market. Previous studies have found that loans contract following tight money. It is not clear whether the financial contraction reflects a shift of the supply schedule or the demand sche...

Should lenders diversify, as suggested by the financial intermediation literature, or specialize, as suggested by the corporate finance literature? I model a financial institution’s (“bank’s”) choice between these two strategies in a setting where bank failure is costly and loan monitoring adds value. All else equal, diversification across loan sectors helps most when loans have moderate exposu...

Do commercial banks invest less in information gathering activity when they compete more aggressively with each other? Does intensifying competitive pressure in bank loan markets affect the quality of informational ties that bind borrowers and lending banks? Using survey data from German manufacturing firms, we are able to directly measure information flows from loan applicants to banks. We fin...

Using a two period model with moral hazard and uninsured risk, we argue that the decline in equity premium from its historically high level is due to a gradual elimination of barriers to universal banking. The loan contracts set up by financial intermediaries became more complete in nature with the advent of universal banking in the 90s following the Gramm-Leach-Billy Act. Hence, it is the natu...