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Prior research suggests that given the legal environment in the U.S., smaller syndicates with fewer lead banks should represent “best practices” to promote efficient monitoring and ease of renegotiation. Such syndicates should be associated with lower loan spreads. Controlling for other influences on loan pricing, we conduct tests of this proposition drawing on data from DealScan, Compustat and Federal Reserve Call Reports for U.S. loans between 1988 and 1999. Consistent with our hypothesis, the number of lead lenders is shown to have a significant positive influence on loan yield spreads.

This study examines whether fintech lending further enhances or mitigates the gender-based differences in consumer loan performance in an emerging market. Using a proprietary dataset of over 5.5 million consumer loans offered by the fifth-largest bank in Turkey and its fintech subsidiary, the authors first document a significant gender gap in average loan performances. In line with the previous empirical findings, men are more likely to default on their debt. The average difference in loan performance is around 10 basis points, indicating a statistically and economically significant magnitude even after controlling for an exhaustive list of demographic and credit characteristics. Next, the authors show that the gender gap in loan performance is more pronounced in areas where women have more outside options in terms of social and economic opportunities. Specifically, the authors observe that gender-based differences are predominantly evident in cities with higher divorce rates, lower young and elderly dependence, smaller household sizes, and higher labor force participation of women. Since the child and elderly care duties disproportionately influence women’s ability to participate in economic life, their ability to find resources to pay their loans in a timely manner improves more in comparison to men in areas where women face fewer restrictions to seek local economic opportunities outside the household. Finally, the authors document that fintech loans partially mitigate the gender-based differences in consumer loan performance in those cities. This result suggests that the developments in financial technology can reduce the inefficiencies associated with human involvement in credit decisions, narrowing the gender gap in loan outcomes to the extent that these gaps are attributable to the supply-side factors that involve human judgment and biases.

This paper examines the effect of bank expansion on credit access and terms of credit in early America. The bank records from Plymouth Bank, Massachusetts and the Census records provide detailed information on borrowers, endorser, types and terms of loans, and borrower characteristics. The results show that the introduction of new banks did broaden credit access. However, after competition was introduced, the Bank focused more on short-term bills of exchange. In other words, the Bank shifted its emphasis from long-term accommodation paper to short-term bills of exchange.

This chapter examines the effect of creditors’ monitoring role on the profitability of firm acquisitions. We use the shares retained by the lead arranger of a syndicated loan as a proxy for monitoring level. We find that acquirer announcement returns are positively related to the shares retained by the lead arranger. The effect of the lead arranger’s shares on the acquirer’s return becomes pronounced in cash acquisition deals, and when there exist financial covenants. Our results suggest that lead arrangers are important not only for monitoring loans but also for successful acquisitions by borrowers. An important policy implication of the main findings of this chapter on bank monitoring is that policy makers should design financial covenants to improve the efficiency of monitoring activities by lead arranging banks in syndicated bank loan deals.

Recent studies on the use of private, non-bank, debt have given conflicting results. Instead of a fixed order of preference between various choices of debt as suggested by previous studies, this study postulates that there is a life cycle of debt choice, and as firms move through the cycle, their preferences change. For stable, mature firms, when given a choice, non-bank private debt would fall in between the two extremes of bank debt and public debt. We provide empirical as well as anecdotal evidence from the trade press to support this view. We jointly model the decision to choose a debt source as well as the amount of debt on data from a current database to focus on the “intentional” change in debt levels, rather than those due to unintentional changes. We find that there are significant interdependencies between the decision to borrow from a particular source, as well as the amount of loan, and that taxes, as well as lender reputation, degree of renegotiability and financial flexibility required by the borrower, are key factors that influence the choice of private debt source.

This chapter shows how to identify the characteristics of borrowers that are part of a credit scoring model. The credit risk scoring model is an important tool for evaluating credit risk associated with customer characteristics that affect defaults. This research was conducted at a financial institution, a subsidiary of a commercial bank in Indonesia, to answer the challenge of determining the feasibility of providing financing quickly and accurately. This model uses a logistic regression method based on customer data with indicators of demographic characteristics, assets, occupations, and financing payments. This study identifies nine variables that meet the goodness of fit criteria, which consist of WOE, IV, and p-value. The nine variables can be used as predictors of default probability: type of work, work experience, net finance value, tenor, car brand, asset price, percentage of down payment (DP), interest, and income. The results of the study form a risk assessment model to identify variables that have a significant effect on the probability of default.

When faced with a financial crisis, debtor countries rarely choose to default on their international financial obligations. Instead, they typically choose to renegotiate their debt service obligations. According to a number of economists, the main motivating factor behind borrowers' and creditors' willingness to restructure is the benefit associated with preserving international trade ties. This raises an interesting question: is the benefit associated with maintaining international trade ties shared equally between the borrower and creditor banks? Or is the outcome dependent on a so-called ‘bargaining game’ between the borrower and creditor banks, and if so, can we identify these variables? According to our analysis, as a borrower's trade ties with developed countries strengthen, the borrower's (and/or creditor's) bargaining power diminishes (strengthens) and it thereafter agrees to restructure at less favourable terms. However, even after controlling for trade ties, we found that major borrowers were able to extract more concessions from the lenders.

The paper investigates whether stock liquidity of firms is valued by lending banks revealing that firms with higher liquidity in the capital market pay lower spreads for the loans they obtain. This relationship is causal as evidenced by using the decimalization of tick size as an exogenous shock-to-stock liquidity in a difference-in-differences setting. Reduction in financial constraint and improvement in corporate governance induced by higher stock liquidity are potential mechanisms through which liquidity impacts loan spreads. These higher liquidity firms also receive less stringent nonprice loan terms, for example, longer loan maturity and less required collateral.

We investigate the nature of mid-loan relationships between bank-lenders and borrowers, to test whether firms borrow from banks to signal quality. Using the LPC DealScan, CRSP, and Wall Street Journal databases, we test whether borrower abnormal returns are related to bank, borrower, deal, and/or event characteristics during the duration of the loan. We demonstrate that borrower abnormal returns are related to mid-loan bank events, defined as an event resulting in bank abnormal returns beyond a specified threshold. The results suggest that borrowers are affected by bank events mid-loan, even when the event is not directly related to bank default.

Pledging collateral to secure loans is a prominent feature in financing contracts around the world. Existing theories disagree on why borrowers pledge collateral. It is even more challenging to understand why in some countries collateral coverage exceeds, for example, 300% of the value of a loan. This study looks at the association between collateral coverage and country-level governance and various institutional proxies. It investigates the economic implications of steep collateral coverage and sketches policy options to lower ex-ante asymmetric information and ex-post agency problems. Within this framework, should a lender collect the debt forcibly on default and liquidated assets fetch prices below outstanding loan values, the lender’s loss is covered through credit insurance, which would significantly reduce the need for steep collateral coverage. This proposal may increase level of private credit, investment and growth; particularly, in a number of developing countries where collateral spread is the main inhibitor of finance.