We examine the effects of political connections on depositor discipline in a sample of Turkish banks. Banks with former members of parliament at the helm enjoy reduced depositor discipline, especially if the former politician's party is currently in power – less so if the former politician served as a minister. Banks with structural problems are more likely to appoint former politicians, but our results remain robust after controlling for selection effects. Ministers may reduce depositor discipline less because they signal severe problems and because the additional government deposits they bring to the bank during their term tend to leave with them.

In this paper, we consider how the intensity and channels of the relation between social networks and bank loyalty vary according to the state of the economy. We analyze bank exit over the period 2005–2012 for over 300,000 retail clients of a commercial bank that experienced a bank run in 2008 due to a shock in solvency risk. The unique and rich data we constructed in close collaboration with the bank enables us to distinguish different sorts of family networks from neighborhood networks, while controlling for a wide range of client-level and branch-level characteristics and events. Using a proportional hazards model, we show the importance of family networks. In times of financial distress, family networks become even more important and retail clients take weaker, less direct social relationships into account.

We compare the investment activities and sources of finance of venture capital (VC) funds in Germany, Israel, Japan and the United Kingdom. VC investments differ across countries in terms of their stage, sector and geographical focus. Sources of VC funds also differ across countries; for example, banks are particularly important in Germany and Japan, corporations in Israel, and pension funds in the United Kingdom. Although the differences in investments are related to funding sources—for example, bank and pension fund-backed VCs invest in later stage activities than individual and corporate backed funds—a large proportion of variation within as well as between countries is unrelated to sources of finance. Moreover, differences in the relation between funding source and VC activity are unrelated to the country's financial systems. We conclude that neither financial systems nor sources of finance are the main explanations for the pronounced differences in VC activities.