We investigate relationship lending using detailed contract information from nearly 18,000 bank loans of small Belgian firms operating within the continental European bank-based system. Specifically, we investigate the impact of different measures of relationship strength on price and non-price...

We study the impact of higher capital requirements on banks' decisions to grant collateralized rather than uncollateralized loans. We exploit the 2011 EBA capital exercise, a quasi-natural experiment that required a number of banks to increase their regulatory capital but not others. This...

We exploit uncertainty regarding banks' involvement in money laundering activities as a natural experiment to study the functioning of the interbank market in uncertain times. We show that bank couples with a stronger relationship (i.e., more frequent and reciprocal interactions before the...

We study the impact of higher capital requirements on banks' decisions to grant collateralized rather than uncollateralized loans. We exploit the 2011 EBA capital exercise, a quasi-natural experiment that required a number of banks to increase their regulatory capital but not others. This...

We conduct face-to-face interviews with bank CEOs to classify 397 banks across 21 countries as either relationship or transaction lenders. We then use the geographic coordinates of these banks' branches and of 14,100 businesses to analyze how the lending techniques of banks in the vicinity of...

Banks have been heavily involved in securitization. We study whether the involvedness of a firm's main bank into different types of securitization activity – asset backed securities (ABS) and covered bonds – influences credit supply before and during the 2007-8 financial crisis. Both types...

Different modes of external finance provide heterogeneous benefits for the borrowing firms. Informal finance offers informational advantages whereas formal finance is scalable. Using unique survey data from China, we find that informal finance is associated with higher sales growth for small...

Current empirical methods to identify and assess the impact of bank shocks rely strictly on firms borrowing from multiple banks and ignore the many firms borrowing from only one bank. Yet, such single-relationship firms may be the most prone and sensitive to bank-loan supply shocks. Therefore,...

How does bank distress impact their customers' probability of default and trade credit availability? We address this question by looking at a unique sample of German firms from 2000 to 2011. We follow their firm-bank relationships through times of distress and crisis, featuring the different...

Using a novel way to identify relationship and transaction banks, we study how banks' lending techniques affect funding to SMEs over the business cycle. For 21 countries we link the lending techniques that banks use in the direct vicinity of firms to these firms' credit constraints at two...