Two Essays in International Banking and Finance

Abstract

This dissertation consists of two essays in international finance and banking. The first essay attempts to evaluate factors that promote or impede cross-border bank mergers and acquisitions using logistic regressions. The effects of bank specific features, from both target and acquiring banks’ perspectives, are estimated. The effects of bank regulations are estimated, from both target and acquiring countries’ perspectives. Three comprehensive and informative dataset are combined to become a unique dataset to study banks’ cross-border merger and acquisition activities. The banking sector regulatory variables included are expected to make this study the first to empirically and comprehensively analyze the interrelationship between bank regulations and cross-border bank mergers and acquisitions. The second essay examines small and medium enterprises’ financing status in transition economies using different empirical specifications. Firstly, factors relevant to SMEs’ financing obstacles are analyzed. These factors are further analyzed to see if they influence firms’ financing patterns differently. Then this analysis is focused on which specific firm level features and bank regulatory practices are relevant to SMEs’ access to short term versus long term bank loans as well as to what extent these factors influencing the structure of loans to small business. This study is the first to explore the impacts of specific bank regulatory practices on small business lendings in transition economies. The feature that data used in this study are distributed across three periods makes this study special compared to other studies using purely cross section data in that some differences over time can be captured.