Competition, risk neutrality and loan commitments

Credit;monetary economics

Bank Risk-Taking Abroad: Does Home-Country Regulation and Supervision Matter

This paper provides the first empirical evidence on how home-country regulation and supervision affects bank risk-tailing in host-country markets. We analyze lending by 136 banks to 8,253 firms in 1,513 different localities across 13 countries. We find strong evidence that laxer regulatory restrictions in the home country are associated with higher loan rejection rates by banks in host-country markets, but that the resulting loans are mostly to small, unaudited, nonexporting, and innovative firms. The results are stronger when banks are less efficiently supervised at home, and they are observed independently from the effect that bank balance sheet have on lending. These findings imply that loose home-country regulation and supervision are associated with important negative externalities for the host-country in terms of more risk-taking by cross-border banks.bank regulation;cross-border financial institutions;financial risk

Trade credit, the Financial Crisis and Firms Access to Finance

We analyse for the first time whether trade credit provided an alternative source of external finance to SMEs during the credit crisis. Using firm level panel data on over 40,000 Spanish SMEs we find that credit constrained SMEs depend on trade credit, but not bank loans, to finance capital expenditures and that the intensity of this dependence increased during the financial crisis. Unconstrained firms, in contrast, are dependent on banks loans not trade credit. Overall, this suggests substitution between bank loans and trade credit that is conditional on the level of financing constraints and is more intense during the crisi

Bank Risk-Taking Abroad:Does Home-Country Regulation and Supervision Matter

This paper provides the first empirical evidence on how home-country regulation and supervision affects bank risk-tailing in hostr-country markets. We analyze lending by 136 banks to 8,253 firms in 1,513 different localities across 13 countries. We find strong evidence that laxer regulatory restrictions in the home country are associated with higher loan rejection rates by banks in host-country markets, but that the resulting loans are mostly to small, unaudited, nonexporting, and innovative firms. The results are stronger when banks are less efficiently supervised at home, and they are observed independently from the effect that bank balance sheet have on lending. These findings imply that loose home-country regulation and supervision are associated with important negative externalities for the host-country in terms of more risk-taking by cross-border banks.

Competition, risk neutrality and loan commitments

We rationalize fixed rate loan commitments (forward credit contracting with options) in a competitive credit market with universal risk neutrality. Future interest rates are random, but there are no transactions costs. Borrowers finance projects with bank loans and choose ex post unobservable actions that affect project payoffs. Credit contract design by the bank is the outcome of a (non-cooperative) Nash game between the bank and the borrower. The initial formal analysis is basically in two steps, First, we show that the only spot credit market Nash equilibria that exist are inetlicient in the sense that they result in welfare losses for borrowers due to the bank’s informational handicap. Second, we show that loan commitments, because of their ability to weaken the link between the offering bank’s expected profit and the loan interest rate, enable the complete elimination of informationally induced welfare losses and thus produce an outcome that strictly Pareto dominates any spot market equilibrium. Perhaps our most surprising result is that, if the borrower has some initial liquidity, it is better for the borrower to use it now to pay a commitment fee and buy a loan commitment that entitles it to borrow in the future rather than save it for use as inside equity in conjunction with spot borrowing. 1