The theoretical literature had identified potential benefits and costs of close bank-firm relationships for both parties, suggesting possible reasons for firms being vaptured by banks and vice versa. In this paper we empirically explore the effects of long-lasting credit relationships on...

A well-established result of the theory of antitrust policy is that it might be optimal to tolerate some degree of collusion among firms if the authority in charge is constrained by limited resources and imperfect information. However, few doubts are cast on the common opinion by which stricter...

Recent empirical findings by Elsas (2005) and Degryse and Ongena (2007) document a U-shaped effect of market concentration on relationship lending whichvcannot be easily accommodated to the investment and strategic theory of relationship lending. In this paper, we show that this non-monotonicity...

A growing body of research is focusing on banking organizational issues, emphasizing the difficulties encountered by hierarchically organized banks in lending to informationally opaque borrowers. While the two extreme cases of hierarchical and non{hierarchical organizations are typically...

In the early 1990s, a widely-shared opinion among scholars and practitioners was that the importance of physical proximity between banks and borrowers would be doomed to drastically decrease over time and, put in extreme terms, the end of banking geography would become a real possibility....