We analyse whether and to what extent both firm and bank soundness are associated with the use of collateral in bank lending, and whether these relationships changed during the global financial crisis and the euro-area sovereign debt crisis. By using a large dataset of 2 million observations at...

A large body of literature has shown that small firms experience difficulties in accessing the credit market due to informational asymmetries. Banks can overcome these asymmetries through relationship lending, or at least mitigate their effects by asking for collateral. Small firms, especially...

Collateral is one of the most important features of a debt contract. A substantial theoretical literature motivates the use of collateral as a means to alleviate ex-ante and ex-post information asymmetries between borrowers and lenders and the incidence of credit rationing. Through its seniority...

Abstract: This paper offers a possible explanation for the conflicting results in the literature concerning the empirical relation between collateral and loan risk. We posit that certain economic characteristics of collateral may be associated with the empirical dominance of different...

Collateral is a widely used, but not well understood, debt contracting feature. Two broad strands of theoretical literature explain collateral as arising from the existence of either ex ante private information or ex post incentive problems between borrowers and lenders. However, the extant...