Staying Close to Home: Foreign Bank Participation in Syndicated Loans

Abstract

We examine the propensity of Australian banks to participate in syndicated loans to corporate borrowers from 12 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. We find that these banks participate more often in greater numbers and in greater quantity for loans made to Australian and New Zealand borrowers. However much of this apparent bias can be attributed to differences in familiarity characteristics - legal systems culture banking presence and distance from Australia. As these characteristics are likely to proxy for information availability our results provide further support for the view that home bias phenomena are primarily due to information problems.