We analyze the relation between comprehensive measures of board quality and the cost as well as the non-price terms of bank loans. We show that firms with higher quality boards and even a single (non-insider) advisory board member borrow at lower interest rates. This relation exists even after...

How do developments at lending institutions that alter the way they grant and monitor loans influence their borrowers' financial reporting quality (FRQ)? We examine this question by investigating the influence that privatizations of Chinese state banks (CSBs) had on the quality of their...

This paper investigates how lending relationships attenuate the conflict of interest between creditors and shareholders that arises from CEO compensation contracts. We find that lending relationships mitigate the influence of CEO risk-taking incentives on loan spreads, especially for...

This paper examines the feedback effect between trading in financial markets and bank loan contracting. We find that banks charge higher loan rates for borrowers with higher short selling activities. This result is robust to various identification tests and robustness checks. We further find...

We study the magnitude and nature of racial disparities in the U.S. small business credit market. Exploiting a unique dataset containing rich loan contract information, including firm and lender characteristics, we document sizable racial differentials in small business lending, measured by loan...

We study how lender-shareholder distance affects loan contract terms. We hypothesize that an increase in lender-shareholder distance aggravates the lender's information asymmetry vis-à-vis shareholders by making it difficult to observe shareholders' risk preferences and their influence on...

This paper identifies idiosyncratic credit supply shocks across firm size before and after the 2008-2013 double-dip recession in Italy. Based on a fixed effects model, the empirical framework includes both single- and multiple-lender firms and relaxes the standard assumption of homogeneous...

This paper shows that finance has been a key ingredient of long-term economic growth in OECD and G20 countries over the past half-century, but that there can be too much finance. The evidence indicates that at current levels of household and business credit further expansion slows rather than...

We analyze financial support for the entrepreneurial sector. State support can raise welfare by relaxing financial constraints, but it can also reduce lending standards if entrepreneurs substitute public sources of collateral for their own assets, if it encourages excessive entrepreneurial...

We estimate a Pareto distribution for loan losses, as an alternative to the commonly used Vasicek distribution, using simulated data. A key assumption in the construction of Vasicek distribution is that firm-level risk is idiosyncratic. It also assumes that firm exposure to systemic risk is...