Private firms with relatively high costs of disclosure may benefit from a close relationship with a bank. Relationship lending is based on intertemporal contracting and requires the bank to acquire private information about the firm and, moreover, to keep this information private. For both...

We expect that private firms choose a close relationship with a bank – often based on private information – in order to save on direct or proprietary costs of disclosure. For a large sample of bank relationships in 12 European countries, we find evidence that close bank relationships are...

...In the following, we put forward a model in which risk management is the only exogenous function of banks.

The explicit or implicit protection of banks through government bail-out policies is a universal phenomenon. We analyze the competitive effects of such policies in two models with different degrees of transparency in the banking sector. Our main result is that the bail-out policy unambiguously...