Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Three Essays On Banking And Corporate Finance, Fang Zhao

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is composed of three essays on banking and corporate finance. The first essay studies the relationship between interest-rate derivative usage and bank lending. Using recent data that cover a full business cycle, this paper documents a direct relationship between interest-rate derivative usage by U.S. banks and growth in their commercial and industrial (C&I) loan portfolios. This positive association holds for interest-rate options contracts, forward contracts, and futures contracts. This result is consistent with the implication of Diamond's model (1984) that predicts that a bank's use of derivatives permits better management of systematic risk exposure, thereby lowering the cost …