Strong lending relationships between banks and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a key role in the bank-based financial system of Germany. So far, they have been mainly described by the notion of an housebank and transactional features of long-term bank-customer relationships. The...

This paper studies the effects of the bank capital requirements imposed by the European authorities in October 2011 on loan collateral and personal guarantees usage to enhance capital ratios. We use detailed information on the loan contracts granted by a representative Spanish bank and several...