Firms choose debt structure and competing banks choose monitoring intensity. Monitoring improves credit allocation, but creates informational lock-in effects in bank-borrower relationships. In a competitive credit market, banks dissipate anticipated profit from serving locked-in borrowers...

We apply control rights theory to explain the structure and determinants of financial covenants in private equity backed leveraged buyouts. We analyze 130 German transactions from 2000 to 2008, covering about 40 percent of the LBO market during this period. We consider Germany to be a superior...

An important theoretical literature motivates collateral as a mechanism that mitigates adverse selection, credit rationing, and other inefficiencies that arise when borrowers hold ex ante private information. There is no clear empirical evidence regarding the central implication of this...

This model adds to the standard neoclassical model of business fluctuations by introducing a more realistic capital structure problem, where firms have to balance the tax benefits of debt with the costs of potential financial distress. Therefore, firms solve a dynamic problem with both an...

This paper explains the emergence of liquidity traps in the aftermath of large-scale financial crises, as happened in the US 1930s, Japan 1990s and recently in the US and Europe. The paper introduces a new balance sheet channel that links equity capital to the risk-free interest rate. When...

We build a model with a traditional banking system, endogenous entry of firms and fintech intermediaries, and firm heterogeneity in credit access and usage to study the credit-market, macroeconomic, and business cycle implications of the recent sizable growth in the number of fintech...

We investigate the effect of financial integration on the degree of international business cycle synchronization. For identfication, we use a confidential database on banks' bilateral exposure over the past three decades and employ a novel bilateral country-pair panel instrumental vari- ables...

This paper studies the cyclical pattern of ex post markups in the banking system using balance-sheet data for a large set of countries. Markups are strongly countercyclical even after controlling for financial development, banking concentration, operational costs, inflation, and simultaneity or...

This study shows that the presence of imperfect competition in the banking system propagates external shocks and amplifies the business cycle. Strategic limit pricing, aimed at protecting retail niches from potential competitors, generates countercyclical bank markups. Markup increments during...