Essays in empirical banking

This dissertation consists of three essays on empirical banking. They study how do information and political activeness affect banks’ lending behavior, as well as the effect of lending relationship with banks on firms’ stock performance during interbank liquidity crunch. The first essay looks at a type of mortgage application in which applicants reject loan offers from banks and explores which type of applicants reject banks more and which type of banks are more likely to be rejected by applicants. We find that local banks with information advantage are more likely to be rejected by risky applicants and less likely to be rejected by creditworthy applicants. Chapter 3 studies how are firms’ stock performances affected by their lending relationships with banks that suffer liquidity crisis, using an event study of the interbank liquidity crunch in June 2013 in China. We find that firms that have lending relationships with banks outperform others in the stock market. Chapter 4 provides supporting evidence for the positive relationship between banks’ political activeness and their involvements in lending to disaster counties.