Internal credit ratings are expected to gain in importance because of their potential use for determining regulatory capital adequacy and banks increasing focus on the risk-return profile in commercial lending. Whereas the eligibility of financial factors as inputs for internal credit ratings is...

Internal credit ratings are expected to gain in importance because of their potential use for determining regulatory capital adequacy and banks' increasing focus on the risk-return profile in commercial lending. Whereas the eligibility of financial factors as inputs for internal credit ratings...

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are informationally opaque and bank-dependent. In SME lending, banks largely rely on soft information because the scale and scope of hard information is limited. We analyze whether and how hard and soft information affects the borrower's bargaining...