This paper is an empirical examination of the existence of the inside bank premium arising from relationship banking, which is predicted in the extant theoretical models. These models predict that the contracted interest rate of a loan extended by an inside bank when there exist asymmetries...

The question of whether more competition among banks increases relationship banking, which is predicted to improve credit availability for informationally opaque firms in theory, is a controversial issue in the banking literature. By using firm-level survey data in Japan, this paper provides...