Since 1990, London’s SEAQ International attracts considerable trading volume in Belgian equities. This paper uses transaction, quotation and limit order book data to investigate competition between the Brussels CATS market and SEAQ International. It focuses in more detail on the liquidity...

A quality improvement often necessitates modifications of varietal product features. This paper studies firms’ incentives to provide quality when this decision affects the goods’ degree of horizontal differentiation. Intuitively, one is inclined to argue that private incentives to provide...

This paper reviews how long-term relationships between firms and banks shape the structure and integration of banking markets worldwide. Bank relationships arise to span informational asymmetries that are endemic in financial markets. Firm-bank relationships not only entail specific benefits and...

Credit contracts are non-exclusive. A string of theoretical papers shows that nonexclusivity generates important negative contractual externalities. Employing a unique dataset, we identify how the contractual externality stemming from the non-exclusivity of credit contracts affects credit...

We study the relation between liquidity in financial markets and post-trading fees (i.e. clearing and settlement fees). The clearing and settlement agent (CSD) faces different marginal costs for different types of transactions. Costs are lower for an internalized transaction, i.e. when buyer and...

Using a novel way to identify relationship and transaction banks, we study how banks’ lending techniques affect funding to SMEs over the business cycle. For 21 countries we link the lending techniques that banks use in the direct vicinity of firms to these firms’ credit constraints at two...