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...

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...

By applying factor analysis to unique data on loan screening for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Japan, we investigate the factors that banks actually evaluate when underwriting commercial loans. We find that banks emphasize three factors when they decide whether to grant loans: the...

We employ a unique dataset of credit assessments for 3,756 small businesses by nine banks using an identical rating model to examine (i) to what extent loan officers use their discretion to smooth credit ratings of their clients, and (ii) to assess whether this use of discretion is driven by...

Relationship lending helps reduce asymmetric information, which potentially creates benefits for borrowers. However, empirical evidence is mixed. We conduct a meta-analysis to summarize and explain the heterogeneity in the results in the literature using hand-collected information from 101...

Previous research suggests that loan officers may play a critical role in relationship lending by producing soft information about SMEs. For the first time, we analyze this hypothesis and find empirical evidence that indicates that loan officer activities are associated with bank production of...

The question of whether more competition among banks increases relationship banking, which is predicted to improve credit availability for informationally opaque firms in theory, is a controversial issue in the banking literature. By using firm-level survey data in Japan, this paper provides...

This paper studies the welfare impact of reputation/feedback systems in markets where both adverse selection and moral hazard are present. Using a transaction-level dataset from an online credit market, I estimate a dynamic model of borrowers and lenders, in which borrowers are subject to...

Borrowers' reputation concerns makes communication of soft or non-verifiable information credible. We find that some misreporting of short-term information has costs as well as benefits. The costs are due to inefficient management of investments, while the benefits are due to the fact that some...

This paper shows the importance of banking market competition jointly with the number of bank relationships to identify the circumstances where banks and firms are able to establish mutually beneficial long-term relationships. We empirically analyze the effect of the duration of the relationship...