This study analyzes the impact of bank relationships on a firm's cost of debt. We focus on relationships with the main bank. We find that a firm's cost of debt decreases with relationship strength, proxied by the share of bank debt provided by the main lender, but rises with relationship length....

This paper investigates contagion at the German interbank market under the assumption of a stochastic loss given default (LGD). We combine a unique data set about the LGD of interbank loans with data about interbank exposures. We find that the frequency distribution of the LGD is u-shaped. Under...

Relationship lending is a common practice in credit financing all over the world, particularly in Germany. On the basis of a comprehensive data set comprising information on firm-bank relationships for more than 16,000 observations, this study analyses the determinants of relationship lending in...