Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of most Asian economies. The main obstacle to the development of the SME sector is the lack of stable finance. Considering the bank-dominated characteristic of economies in Asia, banks are the main source of financing, and the lack of a...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of the Asian economy. They make up more than 96% of all Asian businesses that provide two out of three private sector jobs in the continent. Therefore, it is vitally important for the Asian economies' economic success that they have...

Due to the asymmetry of information between borrowers that are small- or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and lenders (banks), many banks are considering this sector as a risky sector. It is crucial for banks to be able to distinguish healthy from risky companies in order to reduce their...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of the Asian economy. They make up more than 96% of all Asian businesses, providing two out of three private-sector jobs on the continent. Therefore, it is vital for Asian economies' economic success that they have fully functioning...

Credit risk measurement and management become more important in all financial institutions in the light of the current financial crisis and the global recession. This particularly applies to most of the complex structured financing forms whose risk cannot be quantified with com-mon rating...

This paper investigates how lenders react to borrowers' rating changes under heterogeneous conditions and different regulatory regimes. Our findings suggest that corporate downgrades that increase capital requirements for lending banks under the Basel II framework are associated with increased...

We examine the effect of firm credit rating downgrades on the pricing and structure of syndicated bank loans following rating downgrades in the firms' countries of domicile. We find that the sovereign ceiling policies used by credit rating agencies create a disproportionally adverse impact on...

In this paper, the authors use credit rating data from two Swedish banks to elicit evidence on banks' loan monitoring ability. They test the banks' ability to forecast credit bureau ratings, and vice versa, and show that bank ratings are able to predict future credit bureau ratings. This is...

In this paper, we use credit rating data from two large Swedish banks to elicit evidence on banks' loan monitoring ability. For these banks, our tests reveal that banks' internal credit ratings indeed include valuable private information from monitoring, as theory suggests. Banks' private...

We analyse whether soliciting multiple ratings leads to lower syndicated loan spreads. Our results document that banks apply, on average, lower spreads to multi-rated firms. This effect depends on the reduction of information asymmetry about borrowers' creditworthiness (information production...