Our paper addresses firm size as a driver of systematic credit risk in loans to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Key contributions are the use of a unique data set of SME lending by over 400 German banks and relating systematic risk to the size dependence of regulatory capital requirements. What sets our sample apart is its comprehensive coverage of the particularly rich and well developed ...

This short paper presents a new stylized fact about bank nonperforming loans. According to the data for the US, the average of the ratio of noncurrent loans to total loans for large banks presents a very high negative correlation with the same ratio for small banks. This result remains valid for different measures of bank size as well as controlling for different bank characteristics such as ch...

This paper examines the reporting of bank loans in the financial press during the 2004-2007 period. More specifically, it uses a unique hand-collected data set to examine the frequency and determinants of loan reporting. The motivation is double folded. First, virtually all publicly traded firms borrow from banks. However, despite their widespread use, the reporting of bank loan agreements in t...

This study presents an intriguing contrast of the ex ante and ex post relations between mortgage securitization and loan performance using a comprehensive dataset from a major national mortgage bank. While the paper supports that the bank applies lower screening efforts on loans that have higher ex ante probability of being securitized, it further shows that loans remaining on the bank’s balanc...

In many economies, small and medium-sized firms have no direct access to the financial markets but depend on bank loans. In the market for bank loans, competition is often distorted by state banks enjoying lower funding costs than private banks due to a state guarantee on their liabilities. In this paper, we argue that if the state bank’s guarantee is tied to an obligation to renegotiate loans ...

In this paper we study the impact of more transparency in the interbank market on the volume of bank intermediated loans and on the profitability of the banking business. Transparency is modeled by means of the informational content of publicly observable signals correlated to the random interbank interest rate. We find that more transparency may increase or decrease the volume of bank loans. I...

Using unique proprietary loan-level data, we provide the first comprehensive study on China’s local government debt, which was off-balance sheet. Policy and commercial banks, both of which are state owned, are the main financiers of local governments. We find that notwithstanding their prevalent nonprofit goal of raising social welfare, policy loans perform remarkably better than commercial loa...

We investigate the impact of bank loan announcements on borrower value during the recent boom and bust cycle of the 2000’s using a sample of 253 large loans to French borrowers. We find no significant stock market reaction to bank loan announcements during the boom period but a significant and negative one during the financial crisis. Hence, although we document significant changes in ...