Heterogeneous multiple bank financing: does it reduce inefficient credit-renegotation incidences?

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 bank financing. Yet, in order to reduce hold-up and coordination-failure risk, the relationship bank's fraction of total firm debt must not become too large. For firms with intermediate expected profits, the probability of ineefficient credit-renegotiation is shown to decrease along with the relationship bank's information precision. For firms with extremely high or extremely low expected returns, however, it increases. -- Relationship lending ; asymmetric information ; financial distress ; hold-up ; coordination failure