A unique legal reform in 2004 in Sweden redistributed liquidation proceeds from banks holding floating liens to unsecured creditors. Using a country-wide panel of all registered firms, we document that the resulting reduction in collateral capacity contracts the amount and maturity of corporate...

Standalone ratings measure a bank's intrinsic financial strength but – unlike all-in ratings – do not incorporate potential sovereign or parent-bank support. On July 20, 2011, Fitch switched from a 9-point to a 21-point scale for their standalone ratings but did not alter their all-in...

Can banks trade credit default swaps (CDSs) referenced on their current corporate clients at competitive prices, or are banks penalized for potentially holding private information? To answer this question we merge CDS trades reported under the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR)...

We exploit a nation-wide introduction of mandatory disclosure of borrowers' total credit exposures and show that sharing such information increases credit access independent of borrowers' history. Differentiating between borrowers applying to competitor banks and those reapplying to their...