We examine the effect of corporate violations on bank loan contracting and document that borrowers with higher corporate violation penalties have higher loan costs. Higher corporate violations are also associated with more restrictive covenants and higher likelihood of collateral requirements....

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...

This study enhances the growing research field of Cultural Finance by analyzing the relationship between cultural value types – in particular Autonomy and Embeddedness – and the corporate debt choice of either bank or bond financing. We derive our hypotheses from a slight modification and...

We exploit variation in the timing of bank mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and adopt a difference- in-differences approach to examine how bank consolidation affects financial policies of corporate borrowers. We find that firms increase leverage ratios after their lending banks are involved in...

To what extent can private firms' external equity substitute for debt financing in a banking crisis? To answer this question, I use firm-level data and firm-bank linkages to estimate the causal effect of an imported lending cut from a large German bank on firms' capital structure and real...

Systemically important banks are subject to at least two departures from the neutrality of debt versus equity financing: the tax deductibility of interest payments and implicit funding subsidies. This paper fills a gap in the literature by comparing their mechanism and interaction within a...

This paper investigates the pricing of bank loans relative to capital market debt. The analysis uses a novel sample of loans matched with bond spreads from the same firm on the same date. After accounting for seniority, lenders earn a large premium relative to the bond-implied credit spread. In...

Does a diversification of funding sources affect the financing conditions for firms? To answer this question we study a regulatory reform which allowed unlisted firms to issue minibonds. Using the Italian Credit Register, we compare new loans granted to issuer firms with new loans concurrently...

We investigate how the banking industry concentration and the strength of credit relationships (relationship lending) jointly affect the cost of borrowing of firms. Our results indicate that relationship lending is not associated with the rent extraction mechanism deriving from informational...

We expect that private firms choose a close relationship with a bank – often based on private information – in order to save on direct or proprietary costs of disclosure. For a large sample of bank relationships in 12 European countries, we find evidence that close bank relationships are...