The objective of this paper is to analyse the network topology of the Italian segment of the European overnight money market through methods of statistical mechanics applied to complex networks. We investigate differences in the activities of banks of different sizes and the evolution of their connectivity structure over the maintenance period. The main purpose of the analysis is to establish t...

This paper provides a unified analysis for the onset of the 1998 financial crisis and the strong economic recovery afterward in Russia and other former Soviet Union countries. Before the crisis a banking failure arose owing to the coexistence of a lemons credit market and high government borrowing. In a lemons credit market low credit risk firms switched from bank to nonbank finance, including ...

Margins in international banking have fallen dramatically during the last years. Therefore, banks face the pressing need to develop more suitable forms of organization and more efficient incentive schemes. In a principal agent framework this paper develops four fundamental rules. The marginal benefits from additional risk taking should be equal to its marginal cost. The top management should se...

The main purpose of this paper is to present the empirical findings derived from the data of small firms that the availability of private and public information on the borrowing firm leads to diverse borrowing patterns among firms. Exploring logit models to characterize the firm’s choice of a financial source, we find that firms whose information is poorly recorded, or who are publicly less rec...

Relationship lending is a common practice in credit financing all over the world, particularly in Germany. On the basis of a comprehensive data set comprising information on firm-bank relationships for more than 16,000 observations, this study analyses the determinants of relationship lending in Germany. We find that small, young and R&D-intensive firms tend to choose relationship lending. Furt...

Deposit insurance schemes and bank failure resolution systems are asked to fulfill conflicting public policy objectives: on the one hand, they are supposed to protect small depositors and prevent contagion risks from bank runs; on the other hand, they are supposed to minimize aggressive risk taking by banks. This paper discusses the incentive-compatible design and interaction of both components...

This paper uses a new non-parametric, unconditional, hyperbolic order-α quantile estimator to construct a hyperbolic version of the Malmquist index. Unlike traditional non-parametric efficiency estimators, the new estimator is both robust to data outliers and has a root-n convergence rate. We use this estimator to examine changes in the efficiency and productivity of U.S. banks between 1985 and...

This paper attempts to assess the Europe-wide systemic risk potential in banking. We employ a bivariate GARCH model to estimate conditional correlations between European bank stock indices. These correlations are used as an indication for the interdependencies amongst the banking business and hence for the systemic risk potential. We employ several tests to assess the development of the systemi...

Shadow banking in China is mainly conducted by banks to evade the excessive credit control, which constitutes a dual-track approach to liberalize the country’s rigid interest rate policy. The market track of shadow banking can lead to efficiency gain by allowing credit resale to fund the more productive yet credit-deprived private enterprises (PEs). Pareto improvement can be achieved as the ban...

Pregibit: A Family of Discrete Choice Models The pregibit discrete choice model is built on a distribution that allows symmetry or asymmetry and thick tails, thin tails or no tails. Thus the model is much richer than the traditional models that are typically used to study behavior that generates discrete choice outcomes. Pregibit nests logit, approximately nests probit, loglog, cloglog and goss...