This study analyzes corporate environmental management and its implications for bond investors. We provide support for the view that the credit standing of borrowing firms is influenced by legal, reputational, and regulatory risks associated with environmental incidents. Using environmental...

In case of multiple source lending even solvent firms may be forced into bankruptcy due to uncoordinated credit withdrawals of their lenders. This paper analyzes whether a debtor firm can thwart such inefficient liquidations by offering creditors the option to delay their foreclosure decision...

This paper studies the use of psychometric tests, designed by the Entrepreneurial Finance Lab (EFL), as a tool to screen out high credit risk and potentially increase access to credit for small business owners in Peru. We use administrative data covering the period from June 2011 to April 2014...

There is considerable heterogeneity in the organizational structures of CMBS loan originators and in their incentives for underwriting risky loans. We treat an originator's organizational type - commercial bank, investment bank, insurance company, finance company, conduit lender, or...

In the syndicated loan market, potential accounting errors exacerbate credit risk and asymmetric information problems. The purpose of financial statement audits is to provide reasonable assurance that accounting records are free from material errors. In this paper, we examine whether an increase...

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' credit ratings indeed include valuable private information from monitoring, as theory suggests. However, our tests also reveal...

We investigate whether and how business credit information sharing helps to better assess the default risk of private firms. Private firms represent an ideal testing ground because they are smaller, more informationally opaque, riskier, and more dependent on trade credit and bank loans than...

Does enhancing banks' information sets and understanding of credit risks improve loan loss recognition? We study this question using a global dataset of staggered initiations and coverage increases of public credit registries (PCRs). Mandated by national regulators, PCRs collect borrower and...

I examine how credit reporting affects where firms access credit and how lenders contract with them. I use within firm-time and lender-time tests that exploit lenders joining a credit bureau and sharing information in a staggered pattern. I find information sharing reduces relationship-switching...

We study a dynamic model of collateralized credit markets with asymmetric information, which allows for a rich set of signaling strategies based on the path of debt and repayment. Whether credit history reveals private information about credit quality depends on the degree of uncertainty in...