We investigate the impact of a new bank tax in Poland on bank lending behavior. We find that banks respond to the tax by tightening credit supply and increasing the costs of credit to the real sector. However, the responses vary across loan segments. In line with search-for-yield behavior, the tax motivates banks to shift their allocations of household credit from low-margin and relatively safe mortgage loans to higher-margin and riskier consumer loans. We find no evidence that financially weak banks are more incentivized to shift to riskier loan types. Moreover, firms that receive loans from banks more exposed to the tax experience a greater credit contraction.

Using unique data from a leading peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform, we investigate the link between past investment performance and choice of auto-investing tool. Our results suggest that investors who experience fewer defaults in the manual mode are more inclined to switch to automatic investment. Several factors account for this relationship, including investor inattention, decision speed, investment delegation, and experience. Regarding the latter, our results suggest that experienced investors are more likely to continue self-directed bidding, even if they have faced defaults in manual investments in the past. These investors may attribute their previous mistakes to their own actions rather than the limitations of the self-directed bids. Our results are robust to alternative specifications.

This study examines the impact of political factors on the behaviour and performance of commercial banks in 11 Central European countries from 1995 to 2008. Using a unique dataset of commercial banks and political factors, we find that state-owned banks report significantly smaller net interest income ratios during the years of parliamentary elections. The proxy cumulative amount of net interest income lost by state-owned banks during the election years equals, on average, 0.38% of each country's GDP. The decrease in the profitability of state-owned banks is caused primarily by the lower interest rates charged on loans. In contrast, we document that the lending growth of state-owned banks is not affected by the political cycle. Hence, to a certain extent, this study supports the view that state-owned banks constitute a tool that serves political goals in Central European countries.

We examine the international transmission of liquidity shocks from multinational bank holding companies to their subsidiaries during the financial crisis of 2008. Our results demonstrate that a subsidiary's reduction in lending is strongly related to its parent bank's lending via the interbank market. While subsidiaries that were dependent on interbank financing increased their credit supply prior to the crisis, they reduced their lending activities during the crisis. Additionally, we observe that interbank-dependent subsidiaries tried to change their funding strategy when they were unable to increase their deposit growth significantly during the crisis. During the crisis, subsidiaries could not rely on their parent banks’ support via the interbank market and encountered problems in attracting new depositors, which could explain the significant decline in lending during the financial crisis. These findings highlight the need to regulate and monitor multinational funding strategies, especially in the interbank market.

Drought can tighten agricultural credit conditions precisely when adaptation investments and access to working capital are most valuable. Using bank balance-sheet data merged with county-level U.S. Drought Monitor data for 2000–2020, we show that local credit markets exposed to drought experience significant declines in agricultural lending, with effects concentrated in severe episodes. These declines are strongest in markets served by geographically concentrated banks, especially single-county institutions, and weaker where lenders are more geographically diversified. In addition, we show that counties with greater irrigation intensity experience smaller lending declines during extreme droughts, while drought-related contractions are concentrated in counties with lower baseline crop resistance. Lending responses are also larger in counties with prior drought experience, consistent with persistent climate risk shaping local credit conditions. Our evidence highlights how climate risk, local adaptation, and bank structure jointly determine the availability of agricultural credit during drought episodes.

In this study, we examine the relationship between the structure of financial systems and financial crises. Using cross-country data on financial structures and crises, we find that there is a significant short-term reversal in development of the banking sector and the stock market during both bank crises and market crashes, with the corporate bond market moving in the same direction as bank credit. However, the results are significant for countries with market-based financial systems but not for countries with bank-based financial systems. Emerging markets have mainly bank-based financial systems, which may explain why these markets require more time to recover from economic downturns after a financial crisis. Therefore, we argue that governments should emphasize a balanced financial system structure as it helps countries to recover from financial crises more quickly compared with countries that lack such balanced structures.

We examine the impact of the increased presence of female board members on corporate carbon emissions. Using the staggered enactment of gender diversity reforms in different countries, we find that an increase in the number of female directors after the reforms leads to a reduction in corporate carbon emissions. This effect is particularly more pronounced when the reform is legislative, and occurs in collectivistic countries. Furthermore, the effect of enhanced female board representation on carbon emission reduction is greater following the Paris Agreement. This study offers valuable insights for policymakers who consider gender diversity reform as a strategy against climate change.

We examine the interactions of bank lending dynamics, ownership structures, and crisis phenomena in the banking systems of Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. Using a panel dataset of more than 400 banks for the period from 1994–2010, we show that the impact of ownership structure on a bank’s lending activities in CEE countries was conditional upon the type of crisis, namely, whether it was a host, home, global, or simultaneous crisis. In contrast, our evidence indicates that bank-specific characteristics, such as deposit growth and profitability ratios, are significant determinants of credit growth during both normal economic times and crisis periods, regardless of the crisis type. Moreover, we provide indirect evidence of the benefits of banking sector diversification dependent upon the criterion of parent banks’ country of origin.

This study examines the relationship between family firms and carbon emissions using a large cross-country dataset of 6600 non-financial firms over the period 2010–2019. We find that family firms emit less carbon than non-family firms, especially after the Paris Agreement. Several factors contribute to this outcome, including governance structure, the degree of family control, R&D spending, and the issuance of green patents. Our study also shows that despite lower carbon emissions, family firms have lower environmental scores, primarily due to their reduced public commitment to emission reduction. Both environmental scores and carbon emissions increase when non-family CEOs are appointed and when family ownership decreases, indicating that agency conflicts may influence these outcomes.

This paper investigates the relationship between local banking structures and SMEs’ access to debt and performance. Using a unique dataset on bank branch locations in Poland and firm-, county-, and bank-level data, we conclude that a strong position for local cooperative banks facilitates access to bank financing, lowers financial costs, boosts investments, and favours growth for SMEs. Moreover, counties in which cooperative banks hold a strong position are characterized by a more rapid pace of new firm creation. The opposite effects appear in the majority of cases for local banking markets dominated by foreign-owned banks. Consequently, our findings are important from a policy perspective because they show that foreign bank entry and industry consolidation may raise valid concerns for SME prospects in emerging economies.