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...

All other terms being equal (e.g. seniority), syndicated loan contracts provide larger lending compensations (in percentage points) to institutions funding larger amounts. This paper explores empirically the motivation for such a price design on a sample of sovereign syndicated loans in the...

We studied information and interaction processes in six lending relationships between a universal bank and medium sized firms. The study is based on the credit files of the respective firms. If no problems occur in these lending relationships, bank monitoring is based mainly on cheap,...

The German financial market is often characterized as a bank-based system with strong bank-customer relationships. The corresponding notion of a housebank is closely related to the theoretical idea of relationship lending. It is the objective of this paper to provide a direct comparison between...

This paper provides further insights into the nature of relationship lending by analyzing the link between relationship lending, borrower quality and collateral as a key variable in loan contract design. We used a unique data set based on the examination of credit files of five leading German...

This paper analyses the role of collateral in loan contracting when companies are financed by multiple bank lenders and relationship lending can be present. We conjecture and empirically validate that relationship lenders, who enjoy an informational advantage over arm's-length banks, are more...

We show that performance-sensitive debt (PSD) is used to reduce hold-up problems in repeated lending relationships. Using a large sample of bank loans, we find a more frequent use of PSD if hold-up is more likely, e.g. if a longterm lending relationship exists and the borrower has fewer outside...

The present paper investigates the number of bank relationships of small and medium-sized enterprises in Switzerland using survey data from 1996 and 2002. We differentiate between overall bank relationships and lending relationships and disaggregate the loan market with respect to firm sizes,...

We offer a new test of the ex ante theory of collateral. Theory states that lenders rely less on collateral if they have better information about borrowers. We test this by contrasting the use of collateral between formal and - better informed - informal lenders in a developing financial market....

We empirically investigate the effect that relationship lending has on the availability and pricing of interbank liquidity. Our analysis is based on a daily panel of unsecured overnight loans between 1,079 distinct German bank pairs from March 2006 to November 2007, a period that includes the...