Using a new data set of U.K. syndicated loans, we document a significant loan cost disadvantage incurred by privately-held firms. For identification, we use the distance of a firm's headquarters to London's capital markets as a plausibly exogenous variation in corporate structure (i.e....

Using a unique dataset of more than 1 million loans made by 296 German banks, we evaluate the impact of many aspects of customer–bank relationships on loan default rates. Our research suggests a practical solution to reducing loan defaults for new customers: Have the customer open a simple...

We analyze pricing differences between U.S. and European syndicated loans over the 1992-2014 period. We explicitly distinguish credit lines from term loans. For credit lines, U.S. borrowers pay significantly higher spreads, but lower fees, resulting in similar total costs of borrowing in both...

Are borrowers rewarded for repaying their loans? This paper investigates the consequences of covenant violations on subsequent loans to the same borrower using a hand-collected sample of US syndicated loans during the 1996 to 2010 period. We find that covenant violations have substantial...

A methodology change of an ESG rating provider introduces plausibly exogenous variation in firms’ ESG ratings, which allows us to study their effect on the cost of debt of U.S. firms. We find that loans spreads of downgraded ESG-rated firms in the secondary corporate loan market increase by...

Corporate borrowing has substantially changed over the last two decades. In this article, we investigate changes in borrowing of US publicly listed firms along trends in five key areas: (a) the funding mix of firms and the importance of balance-sheet versus off-balance-sheet borrowing; (b) the...