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This paper investigates how government-led banking liberalization affects credit allocation by banks using as a quasi-natural experiment the establishment of city commercial banks (CCBs) in China. Based on more than three million corporate financial statements spanning over 16 years, we find that the establishment of CCBs led to a 6-14 % drop in debt funding for private firms, as well as a 1-2 % rise in their funding costs. At the same time, private infrastructure firms enjoyed a nearly 6 % increase in debt funding and more than 100-basis-point drop in interest costs despite their inferior credit quality. The debt financing of private firm appears most severely affected in municipalities where officials face high promotional pressures or fiscal constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I empirically explore the relation between bank mergers and the rigidity of banks' deposit rates. I find that merging banks are more likely to change their deposit rates in the first months following a merger. However, in the long term, merging banks change their deposit rates less frequently than non-merging banks. This finding is particularly true after mergers with large target banks and after mergers with a substantial geographical expansion of the bank's operations. The documented post-merger deposit rate rigidity has important implications for the evaluation of merger effects in the context of anti-trust and monetary policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the rigidity of retail deposit and loan rates by applying duration analysis on uniquely rich data. We find that the retail rate dynamics are state-dependent. An important determinant of the duration of retail interest rates are the dynamics of the wholesale (market and monetary policy) interest rates. We also show that the reaction to positive and negative wholesale interest rate changes is strongly asymmetric. Moreover, retail rate durations are significantly modified by bank and market characteristics, such as the size of the bank, its market share in a given local market, and its geographical scope. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite extensive research interest in the last decade, the banking literature has not reached a consensus on the impact of bank mergers on deposit rates. In particular, results on the dynamics of deposit rates surrounding bank mergers vary substantially across studies. In this paper, we aim for a comprehensive empirical analysis of a bank merger’s impact on deposit rate dynamics. We base the analysis on a unique dataset comprising deposit rates of 624 US banks with a monthly frequency for the time period 1997–2006. These data are matched with individual bank and local market characteristics and the complete list of bank mergers in the US. The data allow us to track the dynamics of bank mergers while controlling for the rigidity of the deposit rates and for a range of merger, bank, and local market features. An innovation of our work is the introduction of an econometric approach for estimating the change of the deposit rates given their rigidity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we investigate whether banks that borrow from other banks have lower risk levels. We concentrate on a large sample of Central and Eastern European banks that allows us to explore the impact of interbank lending when exposures are long term and interbank borrowers are small banks. The results of the empirical analysis generally confirm the hypothesis that long-term interbank exposures result in lower risk of the borrowing banks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]