I identify the effects of personal relationships on loan contracting using executive deaths and retirements at other firms as a source of exogenous variation in executive turnover. After plausibly-exogenous turnover, borrowers choose lenders with which their new executive's have personal...

Despite the importance of the hypothesis that trade creditors may act as relationship lenders, it has been virtually impossible to directly test this hypothesis because of a lack of data. We attempt to overcome this problem by using a relatively new Japanese database on small and midsized...

Using a comprehensive dataset of Italian SMEs, we find that differences between private and public information on firm creditworthiness affect the decision to issue traded debt securities. Specifically, holding public information constant, firms with better private fundamentals are more likely...

This paper analyzes the effects of bank mergers on bank-firm relationships. Using matched bank-firm level data, I find that mergers disrupt lending relationships, specially to small borrowers of target banks. However, I find significant positive effects of mergers for borrowers that continue the...

A puzzling but consistent result in the empirical literature on banking is that firms with close bank ties do not grow faster than bank-independent firms. In this paper, we reconsider the link between relationship lending and firms' growth, distinguishing firms by size and "health". The idea is...

Despite the relevance of credit financing for the profit and risk situation of commercial banks only little empirical evidence on the initial credit decision and monitoring process exists due to the lack of appropriate data on bank debt financing. The present paper provides a systematic overview...

It is well recognized that relationship banking helps to relieve the credit constraints faced by SMEs to access bank finance. Trust is an important part of relationship banking. However, the term trust is nebulous,and relationship banking means different things to different banksand different...