To date, there is no consensus about how frictions in the credit market affect the transmission of the monetary policy to the real economy. The traditional money channel states that when the Central Bank reduces its reserves, commercial banks are forced to reduce their demand for deposits. If prices are sticky, in the short-run a decrease in real monetary holdings should lead to higher real int...

It is commonly argued that banks play a special role in the financial system because they resolve an important information asymmetry. The recent development of an active secondary market for loans could however potentially diminish this special role. This study utilizes a unique dataset of secondary market loan prices to examine this issue. We find that new loan announcements are associated wit...

The aim of this paper is to empirically investigate the determinants of creditor concentration in the use of bank loans by firms in a European cross-country framework. We analyze the influence of loan and borrower characteristics but also banking market structure and legal enforcement variables that are expected to influence the financial and strategic decisions relative to bank lending concent...

This paper examines the effectiveness of Japan’s Emergency Credit Guarantee (ECG) program set up during the financial turmoil following the failure of Lehman Brothers, in increasing credit availability and improving the ex-post performance of small businesses. In particular, using a unique firm-bank matched dataset, the paper examines whether lending relationships enhanced or dampened the effec...

An encompassing model of a business loan contract with the bank is constructed to establish the roles and relative importance of asymmetry of information, market power, borrower (entrepreneurial) effort and quality in explaining contract features. Special cases of the model include symmetric versus asymmetric information regimes, competition versus monopoly power, adverse selection versus moral...

In a model of dual agency problems where borrower-lender and bank-nonbank incentives may conflict, we predict a hockey stick relation between bank skin in the game and covenant tightness. As bank participation declines covenant tightness increases until reaching a low threshold, at which point the relation sharply reverses and covenant protection is removed with a commensurate increase in sprea...

This paper presents an analysis of mortgage delinquency between 2004 and 2008 using a loan-level data set from a major national mortgage bank. Our analysis highlights two problems underlying the mortgage crisis: a reliance on mortgage brokers who tend to originate lowerquality loans and a prevalence of low-documentation loans—known in the industry as ‘‘liar’s loans’’—that result in borrower inf...

I test for the existence of a bank lending channel of monetary policy transmission. I identify bank lending channel effects with a simple model of bank behavior incorporating longterm customer relationships. The model suggests that when a large fraction of bank assets is held in loans, contractionary monetary policy shocks are more likely to cause a cutback in bank lending, in turn reducing rea...