We study the firm-main bank relationship in a large sample of Italy's manufacturing enterprises. Our results show that the same firm tends to receive credit via different lending technologies. This complementarity across technologies may have an information basis, because the use of soft...

A vast literature has emphasized that small banks are at a comparative advantage in small business lending. In this paper, we show that apart from size, which is negatively correlated with bank specialization in small business lending, organizational characteristics affect bank loan portfolio...

By applying factor analysis to unique data on loan screening for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Japan, we investigate the factors that banks actually evaluate when underwriting commercial loans. We find that banks emphasize three factors when they decide whether to grant loans: the...

Using a unique dataset based on the Bank of Italy's organizational survey, we find that – after having controlled for bank size – loan officers' authority has a key role in explaining bank specialization in small business lending. In particular, banks that delegate more decision-making power...

Using data on single credit relationships, the paper shows that after a merger or an acquisition, involving two or more banks which had previously jointly financed the same firm, the share of credit granted to the client by the consolidated intermediaries moderately decreases over three years....

We empirically examine the impact of bank consolidation on bank acquisition of soft information about borrowers. Using a dataset of small business financing, we find that mergers of small banks have a negative impact on soft information acquisition, whereas mergers of large banks have no impact....

This paper examines the reciprocal lending relationships between financial conglomerates (FCs) in the repo market to better understand the following key points: what motivates powerful firms to engage in this type of contemporaneous cross-funding relationship; and the implications of such...

Relationship lending has an advantage over transactions-based lending from the viewpoint of information richness. Although financial intermediaries use not only relationship lending but also transactions-based lending. We consider a factor of lending technology choice by a focus on an incentive...

During times of high economic policy uncertainty, domestic banks increase cross- border syndicated lending. We control for credit demand by including time-varying borrower country fixed effects in our regressions. The credit migration effects are strongest for banks with diverse income, and when...

We propose a worldwide-based loan portfolio to measure banks’ sectoral concentration that features prominently in episodes of bank specialization. We use the banks’ real loan allocation worldwide instead of the in-sample data to compute a bank specialization. We find that firms borrowing...