This paper studies the impact of bank mergers on firm-bank lending relationships using information from individual loan … contracts in Belgium. We analyse the effects of bank mergers on the probability of borrowers maintaining their lending … relationships and on their ability to continue tapping bank credit. The Belgian financial environment reflects a number of …

Recent theoretical models argue that a bank’s organizational structure reflects its lending technology. A … hierarchically organized bank will employ mainly hard information, whereas a decentralized bank will rely more on soft information …. We investigate theoretically and empirically how bank organization shapes banking competition. Our theoretical model …

Banks have been heavily involved in securitization. We study whether the involvedness of a firm’s main bank into … and during the 2007-8 financial crisis. Both types of securitization allow the bank to generate liquidity. To the extent … rationing, we find that a longer relationship with a firm’s main bank considerable improve credit supply. In general, we find …

competition on bank orientation - i.e., the choice of relationship based versus transactional banking - and bank industry … specialization. We empirically investigate the impact of interbank competition on bank branch orientation and specialization. We … employ a unique dataset containing detailed information on bank-firm relationships and industry classification. We find that …