Competition,risk neutrality and loan commitments

We rationalize fixed rate loan commitments (forward credit contracting with options) in a competitive credit market with universal risk neutrality. Future interest rates are random, but there are no transactions costs. Borrowers finance projects with bank loans and choose ex post unobservable actions that affect project payoffs. Credit contract design by the bank is the outcome of a (non-cooperative) Nash game between the bank and the borrower. The initial formal analysis is basically in two steps. First, we show that the only spot credit market Nash equilibria that exist are inefficient in the sense that they result in welfare losses for borrowers due to the bank's informational handicap. Second, we show that loan commitments, because of their ability to weaken the link between the offering bank's expected profit and the loan interest rate, enable the complete elimination of informationally induced welfare losses and thus produce an outcome that strictly Pareto dominates any spot market equilibrium. Perhaps our most surprising result is that, if the borrower has some initial liquidity, it is better for the borrower to use it now to pay a commitment fee and buy a loan commitment that entitles it to borrow in the future rather than save it for use as inside equity in conjunction with spot borrowing.     

银行在公司控制权市场中的作用研究——来自中国上市公司的证据

本文以我国上市公司中26例最为接近市场收购行为的要约收购作为样本,实证检验了我国银行贷款强度对公司成为收购目标的可能性和收购成功率的影响。研究发现,银行贷款强度与公司成为收购目标的可能性和收购成功率之间呈显著负相关关系。这一结果的政策含义在于,随着我国资本市场的完善,银行可以通过控制权市场加强对公司的治理。     

Implications of Debt Renegotiation for Optimal Bank Policy and Firm Behavior

This paper analyzes the problems associated with the renegotiation of debt contracts involving a bank (the lender) and a firm (the borrower) when the latter is operated by a risk averse manager. Firms undertake risky projects with loan capital borrowed from the bank. When a firm cannot pay off a loan it is technically bankrupt. Both the borrower and the lender may however experience a Pareto-improvement in their positions by renegotiating the loan. By renegotiating the terms of the debt the financially distressed firm can avoid the stigmatization of bankruptcy and the bank can avoid the costs of seizing the borrower's assets. However, our main finding is that, from the bank's point of view, renegotiating as a policy of recovering loan payments may be inefficient in practice because of false bankruptcy claims and moral hazard problems associated with exposure of the borrowing firm to the risk of default. We present a solution to the false bankruptcy claim problem that involves a mixe d strategy between asset seizure by the bank and debt renegotiation.     

Firm Size Dependence in the Determinants of Bank Term Loan Maturity

Abstract:   We examine the hypothesis that firm size affects the sensitivity of bank term loan maturity to its underlying determinants. As borrower size increases, negotiating power with the lender and information transparency increase, while the lender is able to spread the fixed costs of loan production across a larger dollar value of the loan. We find strong evidence of firm size dependency in the determinants of bank term loan maturity and show that this is unrelated to syndication. Only large borrowers can manipulate bank loan contract terms so as to increase firm value.     

Relationship Banking and Loan Syndicate Structure: The Role of Private Equity Sponsors

Using a sample of syndicated loans to private equity (PE)‐backed initial public offering companies, we examine how a third‐party bank relationship influences the syndicate structure of a loan. We find that a stronger relationship between the lead bank and the borrower's PE firm enables the lead bank to retain a smaller share of the loan and form a larger and less concentrated syndicate, especially when the borrower is less transparent. A stronger PE‐bank relationship also attracts greater foreign bank participation. Our findings suggest that the lead bank's relationship with a large equity holder of the borrower facilitates information production in lending.     

Credit rationing and non-price loan terms: A re-examination

This paper develops the implications of heterogeneous bank loans for borrower and lender behaviour in a competitive bank loan market by considering the own funds-loan ratio as the ‘non-price’ loan term. It is shown that in equilibrium each bank will ration its loan to borrowers by providing them with the smaller loan and requiring the higher own funds-loan ration than they would desire at the equilibrium loan rate. Moreover, restrictive monetary policy that raises the opportunity cost of granting loans decreases the loan size and increases the own funds-loan ratio, but its effect on the loan rate and credit rationing remains ambiguous. Thus credit rationing may decrease as a result of restrictive monetary policy.     

BORROWING RELATIONSHIPS,MONITORING, AND THE INFLUENCE ON LOAN RATES

While monitoring borrowers, a bank obtains private information about its customers, giving the bank an informational advantage in the production of subsequent services. Competing theories exist on the way banks use this advantage in the pricing of subsequent services to the customer. If moral hazard limits the transfer of private information, the borrowing relationship transforms into an informational monopoly and can be characterized as a “wasting asset.” Alternately, if the banks' competitive environment necessitates that cost economies are shared, the relationship has “value.” Ordering pairs of successive loans made to a particular borrower as prior loans and subsequent loans, and controlling for environmental, borrower, and loan characteristics, we show that the subsequent loan is priced significantly lower than the prior loan.     

Economic Growth and Financial Statement Verification

We use a proprietary data set of financial statements collected by banks to examine whether economic growth is related to the use of financial statement verification in debt financing. Exploiting the distinct economic growth and contraction patterns of the construction industry over the years 2002–2011, our estimates reveal that banks reduced their collection of unqualified audited financial statements from construction firms at nearly twice the rate of firms in other industries during the housing boom period before 2008. This reduction was most severe in the regions that experienced the most significant construction growth. These trends reversed during the subsequent housing crisis in 2008–2011 when construction activity contracted. Moreover, using bank‐ and firm‐level data, we find a strong negative (positive) relation between audited financial statements during the growth period, and subsequent loan losses (construction firm survival) during the contraction period. Collectively, our results reveal that macroeconomic fluctuations produce temporal shifts in the overall level of financial statement verification and temporal shifts in verification are related to bank loan portfolio quality and borrower performance.     

The determinants of bank loan recovery rates

Using Moody’s Ultimate Recovery Database, we estimate a model for bank loan recoveries using variables reflecting loan and borrower characteristics, industry and macroeconomic conditions, and several recovery process variables. We find that loan characteristics are more significant determinants of recovery rates than are borrower characteristics prior to default. Industry and macroeconomic conditions are relevant, as are prepackaged bankruptcy arrangements. We examine whether a commonly used proxy for recovery rates, the 30-day post-default trading price of the loan, represents an efficient estimate of actual recoveries and find that such a proxy is biased and inefficient.     

An economic rationale for the pricing structure of bank loan commitments

An economic rationale is provided for the competitive equilibrium deployment of commitment and usage fees in loan commitment pricing. It is shown that, under perfect information, assessing both fees rather than just one permits optimal risk sharing. When the borrower is privately informed about its probability of future commitment utilization, commitment and usage fees can be used to induce borrowers to identify themselves by self-selection through contract choice. The equilibrium characterized here is dissipative and thus raises the usual existence questions which are addressed in the paper.     

The Determinants of Corporate Trade Credit Policies in a Bank‐dominated Financial Environment: the Case of Finnish Small Firms

This paper examines trade credit policies of small firms operating in a bank‐dominated environment (Finland). We find that creditworthiness and access to capital markets are important determinants of trade credit extended by sellers. The level of purchases is positively correlated with the level of accounts payable. Larger and older firms and firms with strong internal financing are less likely to use trade credit, whereas firms with a high ratio of current assets to total assets, and firms subject to loan restructurings use it more. Negative loan decisions by financial intermediaries increase and a close bank‐borrower relationship decreases the probability that a firm does not take advantage of trade credit discounts.     

The Effect of Lender Identity on a Borrowing Firm's Equity Return

Previous research demonstrates that a firm's common stock price tends to fall when it issues new public securities. By contrast, commercial bank loans elicit significantly positive borrower returns. This article investigates whether the lender's identity influences the market's reaction to a loan announcement. Although we find no significant difference between the market's response to bank and nonbank loans, we do find that lenders with a higher credit rating are associated with larger abnormal borrower returns. This evidence complements earlier findings that an auditor's or investment banker's perceived “quality” signals valuable information about firm value to uninformed market investors.     

Does bank competition alleviate credit constraints in developing countries?

Whether competition helps or hinders firms’ access to finance, particularly in the developing world, is in itself a much debated question in the economic literature and in policy circles. This paper considers the consequences of bank competition on credit constraints using firm level data covering 69 developing and emerging countries. In addition to the classical concentration measure, competition is assessed by computing three non-structural measures (Boone indicator, Lerner index and H-statistic). The results show that bank competition alleviates credit constraints and that bank concentration measure is not a robust predictor of a firm’s access to finance. The study highlights that bank competition not only leads to less severe loan approval decisions but also reduces borrower discouragement.     

Lending relationships in line-of-credit and nonline-of-credit loans: Evidence from collateral use in small business

Lender–borrower relationships facilitate monitoring in small business loans. We investigate how the duration and scope of the bank–borrower relationship affect the decision to secure line-of-credit and nonline-of-credit loans. We find that the likelihood of collateralizing a line of credit decreases with the length of the bank–borrower relationship. For nonline-of-credit loans, however, the incidence of collateral pledge decreases with the number of lender-provided financial services used by the borrower. Our finding indicates that the mechanism through which banks obtain private information depends on the type of the loan. Pooling across loan types may dilute the impact of both the duration and scope on the terms of a loan.     

Interbank competition and information production: Evidence from the interest rate difference

In this paper, using firm-level cross-sectional data in the US, we report that interest rates on loans extended by inside banks are significantly lower than those on loans extended by outside banks for younger firms in concentrated loan markets, while such loan rate differences are not clearly observed in competitive loan markets. The analytical model presented in this paper predicts that an inside bank is more likely to quote rates lower than those of outside banks to capture a customer in order to gain time to establish exclusive access to the customer’s private information, counting on the consequent future rent from informational advantages over rival banks, if the inside bank intends to acquire private information about the borrower’s creditworthiness. In light of this prediction, we conclude that the above empirical finding is consistent with the hypothesis that increased competition discourages banks from collecting borrower-specific private information.     

Strategic loan defaults and coordination: An experimental analysis

This paper experimentally studies the impact of bank and borrower fundamentals on loan repayment. We find that solvent borrowers are more likely to default strategically when the bank’s expected strength is low, although loan repayment is a Pareto dominant Nash equilibrium. Borrowers are also less likely to repay when other borrowers’ expected repayment capacity is low, regardless of banks’ fundamentals. We show that changes in expectations about bank and borrower fundamentals change the risk dominance properties of the borrowers’ coordination problem, and that these changes subsequently explain strategic defaults. For the individual borrower, loss aversion and negative past experiences reduce repayment, suggesting that bank failure can be contagious in times of distress.     

The Pricing of Sequential Bank Loans

The theory of financial intermediation assigns banks a unique role in the resolution of information asymmetry. Banks, in general, obtain private information about the borrower and the project during the screening of loan applicants and during the monitoring of loan recipients. Incumbent banks, in particular, utilize information obtained while monitoring previous loan extensions to resolve information asymmetry when granting subsequent loans. We examine the rate on a sequence of loans to a borrower and find that the incumbent bank information advantage has finite magnitude and is quickly reflected in the pricing of the second loan. We also find that the lending relationship does not deteriorate to the detriment of the borrower. This study also provides further evidence supporting the hypothesis that an incumbent bank resolves information asymmetry during the monitoring of loan extensions.     

Bank Forward Lending in Alternative Funding Environments

This paper examines the effects of loan commitments on bank lending behavior in both deposit-funding and liability management environments. Assuming that the bank lends exclusively under commitments and that the number of commitments exercised is uncertain, the bank must choose its supply of commitments. Given this choice, the bank becomes a passive lender to commitment holders. Our focus on forward credit markets sheds new light on the private bankers' assertion that they do not directly determine their level of lending, but merely “accommodate” the credit needs of their customers. Similarly, the central banker's claimed inability to control monetary aggregates in the short-run becomes understandable in a new context. It is shown that the advent of liability management will reduce the volume of loan commitments and the expected size of the bank and of the banking system. It is also shown that increased uncertainty regarding borrower takedown behavior diminishes the volume of commitments, expected bank and banking system size.     

Information Asymmetry and Financing Arrangements: Evidence from Syndicated Loans

I empirically explore the syndicated loan market, with an emphasis on how information asymmetry between lenders and borrowers influences syndicate structure and on which lenders become syndicate members. Consistent with moral hazard in monitoring, the lead bank retains a larger share of the loan and forms a more concentrated syndicate when the borrower requires more intense monitoring and due diligence. When information asymmetry between the borrower and lenders is potentially severe, participant lenders are closer to the borrower, both geographically and in terms of previous lending relationships. Lead bank and borrower reputation mitigates, but does not eliminate information asymmetry problems.     

贷款转让对道德风险监督的影响研究

贷款转让是银行可规避诸多监管而获得低成本流动性的一种有效途径。本文以控制借款人道德风险为目的,采用效用函数分析了不同贷款转让情景下银行监督水平的最优选择。研究结果表明,贷款转让比例越高,边际收益递减阻碍了银行监督水平,可能扩大借款人的道德风险。投资者承担合理监督成本是激励银行实施最优监督水平的一条有效措施。除了承担合理监督成本外,贷款投资者对贷款的合理定价也是激励银行监督借款人的一个重要积极因素。