Over the last couple of years the banking industry has seen a remarkable trend towards concentration. The aim of this study is to examine this tendency and its consequences for the German market. We analyze commercial lending in Germany from 1970 to 2003 for all banks active on the German...

Theoretical studies of bank existence reveal the importance of informational asymmetries (cf., for example, Diamond(1984)). This might suggest that banks specialise their loan origination in specific industries to exploit information advantages. However, modern portfolio theory, although not...

The primary objective of this book is to demonstrate that a firm's financing decisions depend among other things on bargaining power considerations, and to illustrate potential causes for this dependency. Based on a principal-agent analysis where a lender (principal) and a firm (agent) bargain...