It is well recognized that relationship banking helps to relieve the credit constraints faced by SMEs to access bank finance. Trust is an important part of relationship banking. However, the term trust is nebulous,and relationship banking means different things to different banksand different...

Using a unique panel design that enables to control for bank, firm, market and loan heterogeneities, we confirm that relationship lenders charge higher rates in good times and lower rates in bad times. However, we show that risky single-bank firms do not benefit from this insurance mechanism and...

Using a unique panel design that enables to control for bank, firm, market and loan heterogeneities, we confirm that relationship lenders charge higher rates in good times and lower rates in bad times. However, we show that risky single-bank firms do not benefit from this insurance mechanism and...

The German financial market is often characterized as a bank-based system with strong bank-customer relationships. The corresponding notion of a housebank is closely related to the theoretical idea of relationship lending. It is the objective of this paper to provide a direct comparison between...

This study provides direct evidence of the value to banks arising from relationship lending by estimating the market premium placed on banking organizations' small business loan portfolios. Using data from the small business loan survey contained in the June bank Call Reports, we find that small...

A puzzling but consistent result in the empirical literature on banking is that firms with close bank ties do not grow faster than bank-independent firms. In this paper, we reconsider the link between relationship lending and firms' growth, distinguishing firms by size and "health". The idea is...

Previous research suggests that loan officers may play a critical role in relationship lending by producing soft information about SMEs. For the first time, we analyze this hypothesis and find empirical evidence that indicates that loan officer activities are associated with bank production of...

Lending relationships are prevalent in credit markets and are a potentially important driver of bank value, but little is known about the quantitative significance of this source of intangible capital. To estimate the value of these relationships, we develop a model of the lender’s decision to...