Credit rating agencies do not only disclose simple ratings but announce watchlists (rating reviews) and outlooks as well. This paper analyzes the economic function underlying the review procedure. Using Moody's rating data between 1982 and 2004, we find that for borrowers of high...

This paper studies optimal risk-taking and information disclosure by firms that obtain financing from both a relationshipʺ bank and arm’s-lengthʺ banks. We find that firm decisions are asymmetrically influenced by the degree of heterogeneity among banks: lowly-collateralized firms vary...

Small and medium-sized firms typically obtain capital via bank financing. They often rely on a mixture of relationship and arm’s-length banking. This paper explores the reasons for the dominance of heterogeneous multiple banking systems. We show that the incidence of inefficient credit...

Small and medium-sized firms often obtain capital via a mixture of relationship and arm's-length bank lending. We show that such heterogeneous multiple bank financing leads to a lower probability of ineefficient credit foreclosure than both monopoly relationship lending and homogeneous multiple...

This paper studies the effects that heterogeneous multiple bank financing has on a firm's risk- and information-policy, particularly with respect to credit renegotiation efficiency. We find that a significant, yet limited, degree of relationship lending enables firms with high asset specificity...

We study the effects of corporate social responsibility on credit risk for U.S. and European firms over the period 2003 to 2018. Differentiating between the various facets of corporate social responsibility shows that only environmental aspects reduce different measures of credit risk for U.S....