The main objective of this paper is to investigate the determinants of collateral requirements on loans that are extended to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in less-developed countries. Our primary data source is the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) results from Eastern European and Central Asian countries. We observe that country-specific variables are more important than firm-specific variables for determining both the presence of collateral in loan contracts and the collateral to loan value ratios of these contracts. The strongest evidence in our paper addresses the important role that information sharing among lenders plays in the reduction of collateral requirements. JEL classification codes: G21, G32, O16

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The lack of well-documented information in the historical literature on the relationship between war-related expectations and their effects on the bond market in the Ottoman Empire motivates this paper's three contributions. First, this paper is the first empirical study to investigate the break points in the volatility of Ottoman bond prices from a historical point of view. Second, we use the econometric technique developed by Inclan and Tiao (1994) to identify the structural breaks. Last, we use a manually collected dataset from the daily newspapers of the time on daily Ottoman bond prices from 1910 to 1914. Subsequently, we identify five structural break dates, each of them corresponding to important warrelated events. When we investigate the commentaries in the Ottoman newspapers, we see that the outbreak of several wars might not have been a surprise for investors in the Ottoman Empire, as reflected by government bond prices.

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