We attempt to identify the consequence of the separation of inside ownership from control for firm performance. Exploiting the fact that banking institutions may hold their own shares in trust, we construct a clean measure of the wedge between inside voting control and cash flow rights. These...

This paper investigates the equity investments and voting rights that American banks control through their trust business. Following the evidence that German banks use the proxy voting rights they control to place their representatives on the firm's board of directors, the paper also studies...

The ubiquity of bank seniority is now a widely accepted fact in the academic literature. At the same time, trade creditors are sometimes granted a purchase money security interest in the materials or equipment they provide the firm. These two conflicting facts present a puzzle: Why would banks...

We test the predictions of several recent theories of how bank capital affects the rates that banks charge their borrowers. Consistent with previous studies, higher bank capital has a negative impact on loan rates, and this effect is focused on bank-dependent borrowers. Further investigation...

Our results show that the majority of firms borrow for the first time from a single bank, but soon afterwards some of them start borrowing from several banks. Duration analysis shows that the likelihood of a firm substituting a single with multiple relationships increases with the duration of...

This paper brings together two seemingly unrelated branches of the literature that focuses on different aspects of a bank's interaction with its borrowers: the relative priority of bank debt, and the role of banks as quot;relationship lendersquot;. Specifically, we show that bank seniority plays...

Using a unique sample, we attempt to identify the consequence of the separation between inside ownership and control for firm performance. We exploit the fact that banking institutions may hold their own shares in trust to construct a clean measure of the wedge between inside voting control and...

Researchers' attempts to identify the valuation of collateral has been hampered by data limitations. We overcome this challenge by comparing spreads on loans originated by the same bank, to the same firm, at the same origination date, but with different types of collateral. We find that securing...

The idea that banks exist to reduce the costs of monitoring is central to modern theories of financial intermediation. The fact that banks are generally granted senior positions on their small-business loans, however, is hard to reconcile with the typical view that junior lenders have the best...