I identify the effects of personal relationships on loan contracting using executive deaths and retirements at other firms as a source of exogenous variation in executive turnover. After plausibly-exogenous turnover, borrowers choose lenders with which their new executive's have personal...

We use a regression discontinuity design to study ex-post discretion in lender's contractual enforcement of restrictive covenant violations. At pre-set thresholds, we find that lenders enforce contractual breaches at an 11% rate, varying between 5% and 18% and peaking when credit conditions are...

I characterize cosyndication relationships between lead banks and syndicate participants and identify their effects on borrowing capacity during the recent financial crisis. Cosyndication relationships are persistent and reduce bank-bank information asymmetries as measured by retained share....

Lending relationships are prevalent in credit markets and are a potentially important driver of bank value, but little is known about the quantitative significance of this source of intangible capital. To estimate the value of these relationships, we develop a model of the lender’s decision to...

Yes. We construct a novel revealed preference measure of financial statement verification based on matching among lenders, borrowers, and auditors. When borrowers use their lenders' preferred auditors, they borrow larger amounts and at lower rates and contracts depend more on accounting...

We investigate how the introduction of market-based pricing, the practice of tying loan interest rates to credit default swaps, has affected bank financing. We find that market-based pricing is associated with lower interest rates, both at origination and during the life of the loan. Our results...

We estimate the effect of carbon pricing policy on bank credit to greenhouse gas emitting firms by studying cap-and-trade legislation. Our analyses exploit a discontinuity in the embedded free-permit threshold of the federal Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill and the geographic restrictions...