The restructuring of a bankrupt company often entails the sale of such company. This paper suggests a way to sell the company that maximizes the creditors' proceeds. The key to this proposal is the option left to the creditors to retain a fraction of the shares of the company. Indeed, by...

The number of firm bankruptcies is surprisingly low in economies with poor institutions. We study a model of bank-firm relationship and show that the banks̕ decision to liquidate bad firms has two opposing effects. First, the bank receives a payoff if a firm is liquidated. Second, it loses the...

Recent empirical findings by Elsas (2005) and Degryse and Ongena (2007) document a U-shaped effect of market concentration on relationship lending which cannot be easily accommodated by the investment and strategic theories of relationship lending. In this paper, we suggest that this...

A puzzling but consistent result in the empirical literature on banking is that firms with close bank ties do not grow faster than bank-independent firms. In this paper, we reconsider the link between relationship lending and firms' growth, distinguishing firms by size and "health". The idea is...

Due to opaque information and weak enforcement in emerging loan markets, the need for collateral is high, whereas borrowers lack adequate assets to pledge as collateral. How is this puzzle solved? We find for a representative sample from Northeast Thailand that indeed most loans do not include...

Using a novel way to identify relationship and transaction banks, we study how banks' lending techniques affect funding to SMEs over the business cycle. For 21 countries we link the lending techniques that banks use in the direct vicinity of firms to these firms' credit constraints at two...

Did the financial crisis spread from distressed banks to households through a contraction of the credit supply? We study this question with a dataset that contains observations on all accounts in Danish banks as well as comprehensive information about individual account holders and banks. We...

We explore the determinants of the number of long-term bank relations of listed Japanese firms using a unique data set covering the period 1982-1999. Japanese listed firms have about seven long-term bank loan relations on average, but show a large variation around the average. We analyze the...

An entrepreneur chooses a relationship bank or market finance. The advantage of bank finance is that the quality of the entrepreneur’s project is identified early, allowing to liquidate low-quality projects. The loan contract induces an efficient continuation decision if the entrepreneur has...

In this paper we compare the profitability of a merger to the profitability of a partial ownership arrangement and find that partial ownership arrangements can be more profitable for the acquiring and acquired firm because they can result in a greater dampening of competition. We also derive...