This paper investigates the relationship between credit market competition and the availability of bank credit for firms of unobserved credit quality when firms pledge collateral to secure the loans. Loan data from the Spanish Credit Register shows that the average credit quality of borrowers...

This paper examines the effect of organizational distance (i.e. distance between the headquarters of the bank that grants a loan and the location of the borrower) on the use of collateral for business loans by Spanish banks on the basis of the recent lender based theory of collateral (Inderst...