Relationship Lending within a Bank-Based System: Evidence from European Small Business Data

We investigate relationship lending using detailed contract information from nearly 18,000 bank loans to small Belgian firms operating within the continental European bank-based system. Specifically, we investigate the impact of different measures of relationship strength on price and nonprice terms of the loan contract. We test for the possibility of rent shifting by banks. The evidence shows two opposing effects. On the one hand, the loan rate increases with the duration of a bank–firm relationship. On the other hand, the scope of a relationship, defined as the purchase of other information-sensitive products from a bank, decreases the loan's interest rate substantially. Relationship duration and scope thus have opposite effects on loan rates, with the latter being more important. We also find that the collateral requirement is decreasing in the duration of the relationship and increasing in its scope. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: G21, G32.     

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.     

The Informational Role of the Media in Private Lending

We investigate whether a borrower's media coverage influences the syndicated loan origination and participation decisions of informationally disadvantaged lenders, loan syndicate structures, and interest spreads. In syndicated loan deals, information asymmetries can exist between lenders that have a relationship with a borrower and less informed, nonrelationship lenders competing to serve as lead arranger on a syndicated loan, and also between lead arrangers and less informed syndicate participants. Theory suggests that the aggressiveness with which less informed lenders compete for a loan deal increases in the sentiment of public information signals about a borrower. We extend this theory to syndicated loans and hypothesize that the likelihood of less informed lenders serving as the lead arranger or joining a loan syndicate is increasing in the sentiment of media‐initiated, borrower‐specific articles published prior to loan origination. We find that as media sentiment increases (1) outside, nonrelationship lenders have a higher probability of originating loans; (2) syndicate participants are less likely to have a previous relationship with the borrower or lead bank; (3) lead banks retain a lower percentage of loans; and (4) loan spreads decrease.     

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.     

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.     

Financial Statements as Monitoring Mechanisms: Evidence from Small Commercial Loans

Using a data set that records banks’ ongoing requests of information from small commercial borrowers, we examine when banks use financial statements to monitor borrowers after loan origination. We find that banks request financial statements for half the loans and this variation is related to borrower credit risk, relationship length, collateral, and the provision of business tax returns, but in complex ways. The relation between borrower risk and financial statement requests has an inverted U‐shape; and tax returns can be both substitutes and complements to financial statements, conditional on borrower characteristics and the degree of bank–borrower information asymmetry. Frequent financial reporting is used to monitor collateral, but only for non–real estate loans and only when the collateral is easily accessible to lenders. Collectively, our results provide novel evidence of a fundamental information demand for financial reporting in monitoring small commercial borrowers and a specific channel through which banks fulfill their role as delegated monitors.     

Lost in Translation: The determinants and the effect of soft information dispersion in bank lending

In this paper, we examine who holds the decision-making power for credit approval in small business lending; we also examine the determinants of shifting this power from a local bank branch to an upper organizational level. Because soft information is usually collected by local branches, shifting the decision-making power may lead to a loss of soft information because it is difficult to transmit soft information across organizational levels. We find that when the local bank operates with a relationship lending strategy, it tends to handle loan requests, and soft information loss is less likely to occur. We also find that the probability of losing the soft information is much higher when the duration of the relationship is shorter and when borrowers undertake the relationship with a greater number of banks. In particular, our findings suggest that information loss is linked to borrower risk, as risky loans tend to be evaluated centrally. Furthermore, we observe that the organizational level at which loan requests are handled has a significant effect on the approval/rejection of a loan request.     

Does Bank Monitoring Influence Loan Contract Terms?

We examine the impact of bank monitoring on loan contract terms using a new proxy for monitoring ability based on the labor input into monitoring. We show in out-of-sample tests that the proxy is a statistically and economically significant determinant of future loan quality. Accounting for clustering of observations by lead bank, and controlling for borrower characteristics, contract features and bank risk, we find a statistically significant direct relationship between monitoring ability and loan maturity and a statistically and economically significant direct relationship between monitoring ability and the loan yield spread. The relationships are particularly strong for working capital loans. The views and opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority.     

The effects of reputation and relationships on lead banks’ certification roles

We investigate the certification roles of lead bank retention in US syndicated loans with respect to interest rates, then explore how lead banks’ reputation and previous relationships with the borrower alter such certification effects. Our findings support the certification hypothesis. Loan spreads are found to decrease with a higher retention ratio, after controlling for the endogeneity of loan price and retention. The magnitude of certification effect is reduced when the lead bank is a more reputable lender and when there are prior bank–borrower relationships. Lead bank reputation and prior lending relationships can therefore substitute for the need to certify.     

Intertemporal diversification in financial intermediation

This paper examines the incentive problem between a bank and depositors (or deposit insurer): limited liability makes risk-shifting lucrative. We show how intertemporal diversification of lending decisions – i.e. bank’s loan portfolio consists of overlapping long-term loans and is thus gradually renewed – may solve the incentive problem of risk-shifting. A new (or expanding) bank sets a high-equity level and acquires depositors’ confidence. Subsequently, it can allow its equity to depreciate to a permanently lower level. Depositors can control the bank by monitoring equity and realized credit losses ex post; they do not have to monitor bank’s lending choices ex ante. Maturity mismatch – illiquidity of long-term loans and liquidity of deposits – is optimal. The analysis can be extended more generally to the borrower–lender relationship.     

The influence of loan officers on loan contract design and performance

We investigate the extent to which loan officers generate independent, individual effects on the design and performance of syndicated loans. We construct a large database containing the identities of loan officers involved in structuring syndicated loan deals, allowing us to systematically disentangle borrower, bank, and loan officer fixed effects. We find that loan officers have significant influence on interest spreads, loan covenant design, and loan performance. Inclusion of borrower fixed effects increases our power to rule out the alternative that loan officer fixed effects reflect the matching of officerds to borrowers based on time-invariant borrower characteristics. We document heterogeneity in loan officers’ influence across loan contract terms, with loan officers exerting stronger influence over covenant package design than over interest spreads, but marginal influence on loan maturity. Lead officers have greater influence than participant officers over covenant package design and loan performance, but less robust differential influence on interest spreads.     

Do Information Rents in Loan Spreads Persist over the Business Cycles?

In this paper, we seek empirical evidence for information rents in loan spreads by analyzing a sample of UK syndicated loan contracts for the period from 1996 to 2005. We use various measures for borrower opaqueness and control for bank, borrower and loan characteristics and we find that undercapitalized banks charge approximately 34 bps higher loan spreads for loans to opaque borrowers. We further analyze whether this effect persists throughout the business cycle and find that this effect prevails only during recessions. However, we do not find evidence that banks exploit their information monopolies during expansion phases.     

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.     

Bank monitoring: Evidence from syndicated loans

We directly measure banks’ monitoring of syndicated loans. Banks typically demand borrower information on at least a monthly basis. About 20% of loans involve active monitoring (i.e., site visits or third-party appraisals). Monitoring increases with the lead bank’s incentives and the value of information and is negatively associated with loan spreads and maturity. The monitoring captured by our measures can either complement or substitute for covenant-based monitoring, depending on whether the monitoring informs covenant compliance. Banks increase monitoring following deteriorations in borrower financial condition and credit line drawdowns. Finally, monitoring is positively related to future covenant violations and loan renegotiations.     

Financial crises and the composition of cross-border lending

We examine the composition and drivers of cross-border bank lending between 1995 and 2012, distinguishing between syndicated and non-syndicated loans. We show that on-balance sheet syndicated loan exposures, which account for almost one third of total cross-border loan exposures, increased during the global financial crisis due to large drawdowns on credit lines extended before the crisis. Our empirical analysis of the drivers of cross-border loan exposures in a large bilateral dataset leads to three main results. First, banks with lower levels of capital favor syndicated over other kinds of cross-border loans. Second, borrower country characteristics such as level of development, economic size, and capital account openness, are less important in driving syndicated than non-syndicated loan activity, suggesting a diversification motive for syndication. Third, information asymmetries between lender and borrower countries became more binding for both types of cross-border lending activity during the recent crisis.     

Beyond the Transaction: Banks and Mortgage Default of Low‐Income Homebuyers

We evaluate the effects of the lending institution and soft information on mortgage loan performance for low‐income homebuyers. We find that even after controlling for the propensity of a borrower to get a loan from a local bank based on observable characteristics, those who receive a loan from a local bank branch are significantly less likely to become delinquent or default than other bank or nonbank borrowers, consistent with an unobserved information effect. These effects are most pronounced for loans originated to borrowers with marginal credit, where soft information may have a stronger effect. These findings support previous research on information‐driven lending, and provide additional explanation for observed differences in mortgage loan performance between bank and nonbank lenders.     

Determinants of the incidence of U.S. Mortgage Loan Modifications

This paper combines data on the performance of mortgage loans with detailed borrower, neighborhood, and property characteristics to examine the factors that determine the outcomes of seriously delinquent loans. We employ multinomial logit models in a hazard framework to explain how loan, borrower, property, servicer and neighborhood characteristics affect which of the following four outcomes results from a seriously delinquent loan: (1) the borrower cures the delinquency; (2) the borrower and lender agree to modify the loan; (3) the borrower suffers a liquidation (short sale, deed in lieu, foreclosure auction sale or REO); or (4) the loan remains delinquent. In particular, we focus on mortgage modification. We find that the outcomes of delinquent loans are significantly related to: current LTV, FICO scores, especially risky loan characteristics, the servicer of the loan, neighborhood housing price appreciation, and whether the borrower received foreclosure counseling.     

Organizational distance and use of collateral for business loans

This paper examines the effect of organizational distance (i.e. distance between the headquarters of the bank that grants a loan and the location of the borrower) on the use of collateral for business loans by Spanish banks on the basis of the recent lender-based theory of collateral [Inderst, R., Mueller, H.M., 2007. A lender-based theory of collateral. Journal of Financial Economics 84, 826–859.]. We find that, for the average borrower, the use of collateral is higher for loans granted by local lenders than by distant ones. We also show that the difference in the likelihood of collateral in loans granted by local lenders, relative to distant lenders, is higher among older and larger firms, than, respectively, younger and smaller firms. We also find that banks use lending technologies that are different for near and for distant firms, in response to organizational diseconomies.     

Uncertainty and the Cost of Bank versus Bond Finance

How does uncertainty affect the costs of raising finance in the bond market and via bank loans? Empirically, this paper finds that heightened uncertainty is accompanied by an increase in corporate bond spreads, whereas spreads on bank loans remain unchanged. This finding can be explained with a model that includes costly state verification and in which banks maintain long-term relationships with borrowers and acquire information beyond what is publicly available. After an unexpected increase in uncertainty, the probability of borrower default increases. Banks leave the loan spread unchanged to maintain the relationship. In contrast, bond spreads increase because investors demand compensation for the increased default risk.     

Does Securitization of Corporate Loans Lead to Riskier Lending?

This paper finds that loans sold to collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) underperform matched unsecuritized loans originated by the same bank. We find that banks put less weight on the hard information on borrower risk available to them when they set interest rates on the loans they sell to CLOs, and that they retain less skin in the game on these loans, suggesting that lax underwriting standards contributed to the worse performance of securitized loans. We also find that the median non‐CLO syndicate participant retains a lower stake in securitized loans when compared to loans that are not securitized, suggesting that these investors, like lead banks, expected securitized loans to perform worse.