The number of firm bankruptcies is surprisingly low in economies with poor institutions. We study a model of bank-firm relationship and show that the bank's decision to liquidate bad firms has two opposing effects. First, the bank gets a payoff if a firm is liquidated. Second, it loses the rent...

An entrepreneur chooses a relationship bank or market finance. The advantage of bank finance is that the quality of the entrepreneur’s project is identified early, allowing to liquidate low-quality projects. The loan contract induces an efficient continuation decision if the entrepreneur has...

In deciding whether to roll over a loan, a relationship bank that has imperfect private information about its borrowers faces a trade-off. It wants to avoid rolling over a loan to a bad firm so as to safeguard its reputation as an effective monitor. However, refusing to roll over a loan to a...

Both borrowers and lenders can be socially responsible (SR). Ethical banks commit to financing only ethical projects, which have social profitability but lower expected revenues than standard projects. Instead, no credible commitment exists for SR borrowers. The matching between SR borrowers and...

We study the effects of asymmetric information and imperfect competition in the market for small business lines of credit. We estimate a structural model of credit demand, loan use, pricing, and firm default using matched firm-bank data from Italy. We find evidence of adverse selection in the...

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...

Financial institutions constitute an increasingly important cornerstone of capital markets, yet research at the intersection of asset management contracts and asset pricing remains sparse. In this paper, I study how externalities of managerial contracts affect asset prices in the context of...

We examine whether corporate bankruptcies influence bank loan characteristics of geographically proximate firms. Controlling for industry contagion and local economic conditions, firms headquartered near a bankruptcy event experience a seven basis point increase in loan spreads. The effect is...