A dynamic model of unsecured credit

We study the terms of credit in a competitive market in which sellers (lenders) are willing to repeatedly finance the purchases of buyers (borrowers) by engaging in a credit relationship. The key frictions are: (i) the lender cannot observe the borrower?s ability to repay a loan; (ii) the borrower cannot commit to any long-term contract; (iii) it is costly for the lender to contact a borrower and to walk away from a contract; and (iv) transactions within each credit relationship are not publicly observable. The lender?s optimal contract has two key properties: delayed settlement and debt forgiveness. Finally, we study the impact of changes in the initial cost of lending on the contract terms.     

收购方为什么要在兼并交易中雇用投资银行

本文考察了当兼并交易具有哪些特征时,收购方公司更可能会在兼并交易中雇用投资银行作为其兼并交易的财务顾问。研究结果表明,在下列情况下,收购方公司更有可能雇用投资银行作为其兼并交易的财务顾问：兼并交易较复杂,收购方公司的兼并交易经验不足,收购方公司仅收购目标公司部分资产或股权,兼并交易价格较高,兼并交易为敌意收购,收购方公司在金融行业运营,目标公司在很多行业经营。     

替代、互补及互嵌:企业与市场关系的新考察

在现实世界中,企业市场关系呈现出替代、互补及互嵌等多种特征,使得单一的“替代”说或“互补”论均缺乏足够的解释力。本文从交易费用角度将交易关系分为三种类型并指出企业和市场谁更有利于交易费用的节约,主要取决于交易品的特征以及交易本身的具体职能。企业其实是一种通过非人力资本和人力资本、人力资本和人力资本间相互交易以实现生产功能的特殊履约机制。这样就不难理解,只有部分交易可以通过企业与市场间的相互替代来提高效率,而更多的交易则须通过改善企业内部管理或改进市场制度本身来提高其效率。     

Community banks,money and labour productivity

Does money affect productivity? We examine whether bank deposits, a measure of the money supply that excludes currency in circulation, influence labour productivity. Banks deposits are special in that they facilitate transactions and, in aggregate, add liquidity and credit availability to a region. By exploiting the distribution of community bank deposits across the states, we test the hypothesis that money is an input to the production function under a variety of panel data methods. We find evidence that bank transaction deposits and total deposits along with other production function inputs such as wages, labour and gross state product are cointegrated across the states; however, the economic contribution of money to labour productivity appears limited.     

Relative Performance Evaluations in a Model of Financial Intermediation

This paper focuses on the delegation by bank managers of lending decisions to their agents, typically subordinate employees of the bank. We assume that agents may base their decisions about lending to borrowers on decisions other banks have made about these same borrowers. Then we show that there exist some lazy or negligent agents who neither directly monitor the borrower nor imitate the other banks if managers use relative performance evaluations as incentive schemes. In addition, it is shown that the learning or adjustment process of agents exhibits cyclical dynamics. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D82, D83.     

关系交易、交易结构与经济绩效——东亚与中国经济解释的新视角

离散交易、关系交易和科层组织可看作交易一体化的一个光谱,离散交易和科层组织是两个极端,而关系交易是一种中间状态.这个一体化过程的关键变量就是交易间关系强烈的程度.交易间关系影响交易成本和交易方式.不同交易间关系形成不同的交易结构,包括交易的时空结构、信息结构、成本与收益结构和治理结构等.不同交易结构在不同的背景下影响经济绩效.本文超越契约范式,提出了交易结构的理论框架,并对东亚经济和中国经济问题做出了新解释.     

地区市场化进程、市场分割与公司关联交易行为

文章以我国制造类行业上市公司为研究样本,考察转轨经济环境下不同地区间市场化发育水平对企业交易方式的影响。研究发现,与资金占用型关联交易显著不同,购销关联交易能显著提高公司绩效;产品和要素市场越不发达、市场化水平越低的地区企业购销类关联交易越多。结论证明,在市场发育不完善制度环境下,关联购销成为企业降低交易成本的有效交易方式,这支持了关联交易具有效率观的思想。文章结论对于理解转轨经济环境下企业特殊交易行为具有重要意义。     

How have banks fared following a borrower's financial distress?

This paper is the first to study the impact of a borrower's reorganization filing on its lead lending bank and second lending bank. This study analyzes 96 reorganization filings in Taiwan during the period 1995–2006. It is substantiated that the market's reaction to these filings is not indiscriminate and that the forbearance lending to a reorganization filing borrower suggests the lead bank's little concern for its shareholder wealth.     

Banking distress in MENA countries and the role of mergers as a strategic policy to resolve distress

This paper studies banking distress in MENA countries and considers the extent to which mergers are used as a solution for resolving individual banking distress. We use a two-level nested logit model to model the interdependence between merger decisions and the distressed state of banks. Both bank-specific variables and macroeconomic variables are deployed to predict banking distress. In line with other recent papers, we challenge the view that specific bank indicators such as CAMEL category and bank size are more significant determinants of banking distress than macroeconomic variables. A comparison of model fits and out-of-sample forecasts indicates that the unordered NL model statistically outperforms a standard logit model by substantial margins. Our empirical study shows that 67% of the distressed banks in our sample are involved in merger transactions and that weak financial status systematically increases the likelihood of a bank being involved in a merger. Distressed state-owned banks are less likely to be a target of a merger transaction. However, global economic conditions do not significantly affect the decision of distressed banks to initiate a merger policy.     

MICROBUSINESS ACCOUNTING AND MACROECONOMIC ACCOUNTING: THE LIMITS TO CONSISTENCY*

The paper is concerned with analyzing the consistency problem that arises when the macroenterprise sector of a nation's accounting system is put on a microdata foundation. This foundation is composed of sets of microbusiness accounts, after some appropriate rearrangements and reclassifications. We pose the question: can the macroenterprise sector accounts be regarded as a consolidation of (observed) microbusiness accounts? The answer is positive from a purely conceptual viewpoint, but negative from a statistical viewpoint which preserves the decision-making records of microbusiness units. The latter phenomenon is referred to as the limits to (statistical) consistency while attempting to maintain the viability of a national accounting system. The analysis proceeds by exploiting the structural properties of market transactions matrices for a nation's economy. The results are sufficiently general to encompass the case where the transaction matrices are initially characterized by both sectoral discrepancies and transaction flow category discrepancies. In this general context it is shown that the statistical inconsistency potentially resulting from the replacement of the macroenterprise sector by an aggregation of microbusiness units has certain properties with economic meaning. This leads to a discussion that explains the ultimate rationale of statistical inconsistency: the fact that different microeconomic decision units may have different views and knowledge of common market transactions. The paper concludes with some implications for future research that appear to follow from the historical development of the subject matter.     

Estimating the direct impact of bank liquidity shocks on the real economy: Evidence from letter‐of‐credit import transactions in Colombia

This study identifies and provides an estimate of the impact of bank liquidity shocks on real economic activity by exploring letter‐of‐credit import transactions in Colombia during the 2008 to 2009 global financial crisis. The detailed dataset on letter‐of‐credit transactions allows for exploiting within‐importer–exporter variation across issuing banks. The study finds substantial effects of bank liquidity shocks on letter‐of‐credit import transactions: banks that were more vulnerable to adverse liquidity shocks—proxied by the ex ante reliance on wholesale funding or borrowings from foreign banks—reduced letter‐of‐credit issuances more in both intensive and extensive margins. The study also confirms that it had real effects: importer–exporter pairs that relied more on letter‐of‐credit transactions experienced a greater reduction in their total imports in response to adverse bank liquidity shocks.     

Economic Integration in the Caribbean Community: A Problem of Institutional Adjustment

Law and the economy co-evolve. John R. Commons demonstrated this co-evolution in the transformation of the legal definition of property from physical property to intangible property or the exchange-value of anything realized through transactions. Reasonable transactions required informed participation by parties. The "fetish of liquidity" in the secondary mortgage market fostered by federal laws, favoring mortgage-backed securities, converted the transaction into intangible property. The debtor was no longer the customer of the bank but an obligor to nameless investors uninterested in his/her community. The secondary mortgage market deviated from Commons's standard for reasonable transactions because investors and home buyers were ignorant of the rights, duties, liberties, and exposures of the transactions. We examine the economic outcomes produced by these legal changes in Nevada, and the endogenous forces ignited by these practices in terms of foreclosures and failing communities.     

A Theory of Conflicts of Interest in Banking Relationships

Abstract

This paper highlights a dark side of banking relationships by elucidating the conditions under which a pre-existing relationship between a lending bank and a borrower can be detrimental to positive valuation effects of loan announcements. The effect of a pre-existing relationship is more likely to be negative when the pre-existing loans are large and firms' screening costs are low. A theoretical model shows that loan announcement's positive effect on borrowers' value due to the standard information advantage can be more than offset by the bank's conflict of interest when the bank's asset quality reputation is poor, i.e. when the probability of the bank holding a bad loan is large.     

Lending technologies,banking relationships,and firms’ access to credit in Italy: the role of firm size

This paper analyses the role of lending technologies and banking relationships on firms’ credit access in Italy. Using EFIGE firm-level data, we show that the depth and strength of firm–bank relationships have heterogeneous effects on credit demand and rationing probabilities depending on the size of the borrower. Multiple banking relationships alleviate financial constraints for small firms, while borrowing from a large number of lenders hinders access to credit for large companies. Small and medium-sized enterprises with a higher share of debt with the main bank have a lower probability of being credit denied, as debt concentration contributes to overcome the opacity problems typical of the SMEs. Long-lasting relationships, by reducing information asymmetries, significantly improve access to credit for small and large firms. Conversely, we find that medium-sized enterprises are more exposed to financing constraints as relationship duration increases, due to possible lock-in effects. Finally, firms maintaining banking relationships based on transactional technologies are more likely to be credit denied, while the use of relationship lending technologies improves credit availability for both small and large enterprises.     

Product mix,transactions and cost behaviour: a study of South African bank branches

This paper utilizes microeconomic theory and a panel data set to assess the impact of product mix and transactions on cost behaviour of bank branches in South Africa over the short and long‐term. Estimates of properties of concavity and monotonocity indicate that the cost functions of typical bank branches in South Africa are neither consistent with short‐term nor long‐term cost‐minimizing behaviour. This corroborates earlier findings which indicate that South African banks have low production efficiency and high market power. In addition the cost functions and two production‐output type indices indicate that overall, the intermediation‐output type mix (foreign exchange and custodial services) has a more significant effect on cost behaviour than the production‐output type mix (cheque and deposit accounts). The variety of production‐output type services provided by a branch appears to have limited effect on costs. However the financial value of production‐output type transactions has an impact on costs while the financial value of intermediation type products does not. Branches that provide intermediation‐output type products tend to have higher variable costs – the key determinant of costs is the number of transactions.     

The Number of Bank Relationships of SMEs: A Disaggregated Analysis of Changes in the Swiss Loan Market

This paper investigates changes in the number of bank relationships of small and medium-sized enterprises in Switzerland from 1996 to 2002. It differentiates between overall bank relationships and lending relationships and disaggregates the loan market with respect to firm sizes, industries and banking groups. On average, bank lending declined, and the concentration of lending relationships increased. The changes seem to have been driven by demand and supply for medium-sized firms, but only by supply for micro and small firms. Supply-side reductions resulted from a merger and changes in credit risk management by major banks. We find evidence of increasing specialization of larger banks on transaction lending and of smaller and regional banks on relationship lending.     

Transaction costs and partnerships: The case of rock bands

This paper applies transaction cost economics to rock bands. It develops the importance of asset specificity. A number of phenomena in the field are shown to be explicable in terms of transactions costs.     

Microfinance spillovers: A model of competition in informal credit markets with an application to Indian villages

Despite widespread interest in the development of microfinance, spillover effects on the non-using population and redistributive issues remain largely unexplored. I study a competition game between microfinance institutions (MFIs) offering joint-liability loans and moneylenders offering individual loans in presence of adverse selection. I show that one unintended consequence of the entry of a microfinance sector in local credit markets can be to trigger an increase in the equilibrium informal interest rate, because MFIs tend to attract a disproportionately-safe share of the borrower pool away from incumbent moneylenders. The existence of such composition externality depends crucially on the size of the microfinance sector and the risk composition of the borrower pool. The model predicts a non-linearly increasing relationship between informal interest rates and MFIs' capacity in relatively safe credit markets, and no relationship in risky villages. I show evidence supporting these predictions, using a first-hand panel database that records all credit transactions over 8 years for a sample of about 1000 households living in Indian villages with extensive space and time variation in the size of their microfinance sector.     

Does Institutional Linkage of Bank‐MFI Foster Inclusive Financial Development Even in the Presence of MFI Frauds?

Growing reports indicate the presence of frauds in microfinance institutions (MFIs), as it can occur in any organization in countries where there are weak institutions, weak rule of law, and fraudulent behavior of MFI officers for personal gain. While there are increasing calls to launch financial governance of these NGO MFIs, there are concerns as to whether frauds of this nature can damage MFIs’ contributions to the credit market, particularly in the bank‐linkage program where the NGO MFIs act as third party intermediary. The purpose of this study was to analyze the collusion decisions faced by MFIs and their impact on the bank‐linkage program, which has been offered as a solution to help overcome adverse selection and moral hazard problems in the credit market by harnessing local information via MFIs. Our results show that even when there is a chance of collusion between MFI and the borrower, the linkage between MFI and bank can still increase the probability that the borrower puts in full effort, and therefore decreases the probabilities of both credit rationing and strategic default. Such linkage in financing viable projects can make micro‐financing more effective in achieving inclusive financial development and thereby poverty reduction in rural areas.