Event-study driven research has produced a consensus that loans are unique relative to other financial contracts. But these studies assume that small samples of loan announcements adequately represent the loan population. We find that loan announcements are rare and driven by factors such as...

Based on our study of the biggest corporate failures in history from Barings Bank to General Motors we contend that despite the seemingly varied reasons suggested by the media the underlying cause of corporate failures in majority of the cases was agency problem. The academic literature...

We question the validity of the broad consensus in the literature that loans are unique relative to other financial contracts. Research in this area is event-study driven and implicitly assumes that relatively small samples of loan announcements adequately represent all bank loans. Our analysis...