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ABSTRACTWe examine policy‐related economic uncertainty effects on the availability of credit, non‐performing loans and loan loss provisions using a panel of 18 countries. We provide significant evidence that uncertainty reduces the availability of credit while leading to increases in banks' non‐performing loans and loan loss provisions, distorting sectoral stability. Our findings are economically meaningful.

We study strategic trade policy design when governments are incompletely informed about the market demand. Two symmetric, homogeneous product Cournot firms, one in each country, compete in a third country market. Contrary to what common sense would suggest, we show that if governments are less informed on the stochastic market demand both countries will be better off. Also contrary to findings in the literature, we show that when the government is partially informed, although quantity controls would be optimal for both high and low levels of demand uncertainty, subsidies are preferred for intermediate levels.

In this paper we re‐examine commercial banks' lending behavior taking into account changes in the stance of monetary policy in conjunction with changes in financial sector uncertainty. Our empirical findings, gathered from a very large data set covering all banks in the USA between 1986 and 2000, cast substantial doubt on the presence of a bank lending channel for the USA. We also show that financial uncertainty has an important and significant role in the monetary policy transmission mechanism which varies considerably across bank categories and the strength of banks' balance sheets.

This paper analyzes the effects of parliamentary election cycles on the Turkish banking system. Using annual bank-level data representing all banks in Turkey during 1963–2005, we present evidence of meaningful differences in the structure of bank assets, liabilities and financial performance across different stages of the parliamentary election cycle. However, we find that government-owned banks' behavior does not differ from either domestic or foreign-owned private sector banks before, during or after elections. Our estimates also show that government-owned banks underperform their domestic and foreign-owned private sector counterparts.

AbstractWe show that deviations from the firm's target leverage are priced in the cross‐section of stock returns and that the relation between these quantities is nonlinear. The concave nonlinear relation between deviation from the target leverage and next‐period return is strong during economic expansions and vanishes during recessions. Our portfolio analysis provides support for the concave relation between deviation from the target leverage and next‐period returns as well. We develop a factor named variance of deviation from optimal leverage (VDOL) and show that it is an important risk factor that has been omitted in the literature.