The literature on debt restructuring usually assumes that banks behave in a uniform way towards firms in distress. Using a recent survey of Italian banks, we show that banks follow different strategies when they decide whether to take part in the workout process, in that some of them do...

When the debt of firms in distress is dispersed, a restructuring agreement is difficult to reach because of free riding. We develop a repeated game in which banks come across each other frequently, allowing them to threaten a punishment in case of free riding. As the number of lending banks...

We explore Lithuanian credit register data and two bank closures to provide a novel estimate of firms' bank-switching costs and a novel identification of the hold-up problem. We show that when a distressed bank's closure forced firms to switch, these firms started borrowing at lower interest...

We use data on financially distressed Chinese companies in order to study a debt market where property rights are crudely defined and poorly enforced. To help with identification we use an event where a business-friendly province published new guidelines regarding the administration and...

In the recent theoretical literature on lending risk, the coordination problem in multi-creditor relationships have been analyzed extensively. We address this topic empirically, relying on a unique panel data set that includes detailed credit-file information on distressed lending relationships...

We develop a tractable model of strategic debt renegotiation in which businesses are sequentially interconnected through their liabilities. This financing structure, which we refer to as a "debt chain", gives rise to externalities, as a lender's willingness to provide concessions to his...

We study the restructuring process of small and medium-sized firms in financial distress. We have a unique dataset with firms in the Netherlands that are assisted in their restructuring effort by banks. Part of our dataset consists of firms that successfully restructure their operations and...

Firms' innovative activities can be sensitive to public policies that affect the availability of capital for risky projects. In this paper, we investigate the effects of regional and temporal variation in U.S. personal bankruptcy laws on firms' innovative activities. We find bankruptcy laws that...

We study the sensitivity of banks' credit supply to small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) in the UK to banks' financial condition before and during the financial crisis. Employing unique data on the geographical location of all bank branches in the UK, we connect firms' access to bank credit...