Decades of investment decisions by central planners left communist societies with structures of production ill-prepared for competitive markets. Their vulnerability to liberalization, however, varied across space. Similar to the effects identified in the "China shock'' literature, we hypothesize...

This paper investigates whether foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows are higher in countries ruled by trustworthy-looking or competent-looking leaders. After collecting pictures of 276 nondemocratic leaders in office between 1975 and 2010, we use a computer-based survey to assess how these...

Using an international panel of banks, we study whether banks’ capitalization and risk-taking are shaped by their prior economic experience. We find that, on average, bank’s past undercapitalization experience leads to more prudent lending and higher capitalization. However, we show that...

This paper sheds light on the effectiveness of policies addressing high non-performing loans (NPLs). Using data on ownership of subsidiaries of foreign banks in Emerging Europe, we first show that changes in NPLs of parent banks are associated with changes in NPLs of their foreign affiliates,...

Does income inequality affect banks' credit-risk reallocation when facing financial distress? Using novel branch-level data on Colombian banks I find that facing a large liquidity shock, exposed banks shift more credit towards low-risk borrowers in municipalities with higher income inequality....

We present unique data on governance in Russian financial institutions. Despite the recent introduction of the corporate governance code, we observe large cross-sectional differences in the composition of supervisory and executive boards of directors of Russian banks. We begin analyzing the data...

Loan-to-deposit ratio may bring unintended consequences on the financial stability. We employ China’s LDR deregulation in 2015 to examine the effect of LDR on bank stability. We show that the deregulation of LDR increases the stability of banks with high LDR. Specifically, the deregulation of...

We investigate whether the occurrence of elections affect access to credit for firms. We perform an investigation using firm-level data covering 44 developed and developing countries. We find that elections have a detrimental influence on access to credit: firms are more credit-constrained in...

Using OeNB Euro Survey data from fall 2020, we will briefly address the questions: Who has been affected by the covid-19 pandemic and how severely? We will look at the results along three dimensions: (1) across main socio-economic characteristics, (2) across regions and countries, (3) across...

How important is a relationship with a bank to a firm’s performance and survival? If firms can easily switch among different sources of credit supply, then the loss of any one source may have little implication for the firms that have borrowed from that source. However, to the extent that...