The nature of the Thai banking system in the pre-crisis era has been of great interest in the aftermath of Thailand’s 1997 financial crisis. Scores of studies have put great emphasis on the factors contributing to the crisis. There has been scant prior research on how Thai banks operate in practice since the crisis and the researcher was interested in better understanding this, particularly how the banks deal with information-related problems. The main objective of the research is to give an insight into the actions that Thai bankers carry out and how their activities are perceived by corporate borrowers, auditors, regulators and the bankers themselves. In dealing with informational problems, Thai banks employ screening techniques, collateral requirements, loan covenants, monitoring, and their relationships with borrowers in an attempt to mitigate the costs of both adverse selection and moral hazard problems. The study finds that there have been significant improvements in the banking system which has made Thai banks more compliant with internationally accepted lending practice. However, there is still room for further studies on how to create incentives to improve financial disclosure among small and medium enterprises (SMEs), how to establish sound corporate governance of banks, and how to minimise political interference in Thai state-owned banks.

There are many channels that the Fed uses to transmit monetary policy, bank lending channel being one of them. The lending view focuses on the potential fluctuations in loan supplied by banks have on aggregate activity due to a fall in Fed Reserves. This thesis investigates the significance of the bank lending channel because of its important effect on investment (and consequently, aggregate output). In addition, Institutional Memory, deteriorating memory in loan officers causing more loans to be processed at the top of the business cycle (Berger and Udell, 2002) is tested on Core loans using 4 lags (1 year) to find out if bank lending behavior exists. Using Core loans (Commercial and Industrial, Real Estate, and Consumer loans) of commercial banks for the United States over a nineteen year period (1985-2004) results find significant evidence in the bank lending channel through Commercial & Industrial, and Real Estate loans. Firstly, through a correlation computation, it was found that Core loans were procyclical with aggregate output (GDP). Analyzing the [ cyclical] movements of Core loans around their trends with respect to Business cycle peaks, troughs, and GDP, it was found that Commercial & Industrial, and Real Estate loans provided supporting evidence on procyclical movements with the economy, implying the connection of the Federal Reserve and the economy through the bank lending channel is more effective through the aforementioned loans. Finally, four periods (1 year) in lags were used in autocorrelations to test for Institutional Memory. The computations find that Real Estate loans have a one year memory. This means that, for instance, if a recession were occurred today, Real Estate loans will not be affected until one year from today.