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...

Explores the role of bank-borrower relationships in small firm finance. Focus is on the availability and terms of lines of credit approved by banks. Data were obtained from the U.S. National Survey of Small Business Finances conducted in 1988-89. Telephone interviews were conducted with...

We test the implications of Flannery's (1986) and Diamond's (1991) models concerning the effects of risk and asymmetric information in determining debt maturity, and we examine the overall importance of informational asymmetries in debt maturity choices. We employ data on over 6,000 commercial...

We show that collateral plays an important role in the design of debt contracts, the provision of credit, and the incentives of lenders to monitor borrowers. Using a unique dataset from a large bank containing timely assessments of collateral values, in conjunction with a legal reform that...

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 risk-collateral...

Can banks trade credit default swaps (CDSs) referenced on their current corporate clients at competitive prices, or are banks penalized for potentially holding private information? To answer this question we merge CDS trades reported under the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR)...

What is in banks’ private information about borrowers, and how does it relate to physical distance and relationship length? Exploiting the Federal Reserve’s comprehensive supervisory loan-level dataset on corporate borrowers, we distinguish two dimensions of private information embedded in...