An important theoretical literature motivates collateral as a mechanism that mitigates adverse selection, credit … incidence of collateral. We exploit exogenous variation in lender information related to the adoption of an information … technology that reduces ex ante private information, and compare collateral outcomes before and after adoption. Our results are …

of firms in Western Germany and Eastern Germany as a transitional economy. Innovative activity has a positive impact on … firm value proxied by ratings in Western Germany, but a negative impact in Eastern Germany. We also consider future … financial distress, and find that R&D in Eastern German firms leads to higher default risk, in contrast to Western Germany …

Collateral is a widely used, but not well understood, debt-contracting feature. Two broad strands of theoretical … literature explain collateral as arising from the existence of either ex ante private information or ex post incentive problems … ex post theories of collateral are empirically dominant although the ex ante theories are also valid for customers with …

for all participating nations which is Pareto improving. Since collateral requirements are calculated on individual risk …

decouple across secured and unsecured markets following an adverse shock to credit risk. The scarcity of underlying collateral …

The ECB has accepted increasing amounts of rubbish collateral since the crisis started leading to exposure to serious …