Commercial bank entry into securities underwriting can affect underwriter behavior because, unlike investment houses, banks also lend to firms. This raises several issues. Are banks better certifiers of firms’ securities than investment houses? If banks hold equity in firms rather than debt, does this make certification more credible? Would one type of underwriter drive out the other? This paper provides a model for analyzing such issues, and derives several interesting results. First, banks, as lenders to firms, can actually be better certifiers than investment houses. Second, equity holding can hinder banks’ certification ability. Finally, banks and investment houses can co-exist.

When commercial banks make loans to firms and also underwrite securities, does this hamper or enhance their role as certifiers of firm value? This paper examines empirically the pricing of bank-underwritten securities as compared to investment-house-underwritten securities over a unique period in the U.S. (pre-Glass-Steagall) when both banks and investment houses were allowed to underwrite securities. The evidence shows that investors were willing to pay higher prices for securities underwritten by banks rather than investment houses. The results support a certification role for banks, which is more valuable for junior and information sensitive securities.

We use proprietary data to analyze the importance of retail banking relationships to commercial banks and their depositors when banks underwrite securities. We find lead underwriters’ retail customers benefit as they demand and end up with significantly more of the highly underpriced issues. We find it is actual underpricing beyond that predicted by grey markets that drive the differential demand from the lead bank retail clientele, suggesting that banks pass on information about underpriced initial public offerings to their retail depositors. We analyze banks’ incentives for such behavior and find evidence of banks benefiting through retail cross-selling—both brokerage accounts and consumer loans increase significantly.

This paper examines the secondary market for loan sales and, in particular, loan contract design as a mechanism to resolve informational issues in loan sales and associated costs and benefits. Using loan-level data, we find that sold loans contain additional covenants and more restrictive net worth covenants, particularly when agency and informational problems are more severe. Why do borrowers agree to incur the additional costs associated with loan sales? Our evidence suggests that these borrowers benefit through increased private debt availability. Further, loan sales go hand in hand with more durable lending relationships, suggesting that risk management aids continued relationship lending.

Venture capital financing is widely believed to be influential for new innovative companies. We provide empirical evidence that venture capital financing is related to product market strategies and outcomes of start-ups. Using a unique hand-collected database of Silicon Valley high-tech start-ups we find that innovator firms are more likely to obtain venture capital than imitator firms. Venture capital is also associated with a significant reduction in the time to bring a product to market, especially for innovators. Our results suggest significant interrelations between investor types and product market dimensions, and a role of venture capital for innovative companies.

Using a unique dataset of more than 1 million loans made by 296 German banks, we evaluate the impact of many aspects of customer–bank relationships on loan default rates. Our research suggests a practical solution to reducing loan defaults for new customers: Have the customer open a simple transactions account – savings or checking account. Observe for some time and then decide whether to make a loan. Loans made under this model have lower default, as banks can use historical data about their borrowers to establish a baseline against which new client-related information can be evaluated. Banks assemble this historical information through relationships of different forms. We define relationships in many different ways to capture non-credit relationships, transaction accounts, as well as the depth and intensity of relationships, and find each of these can provide information that helps reduce default – even establishing a simple savings or checking account and observing the activity prior to loan granting can help reduce loan defaults. Our results show that banks with relationship-specific information act differently compared with banks that do not have this information both in screening and subsequent monitoring borrowers which helps reduce loan defaults.

ABSTRACT This paper examines whether there are efficiencies that benefit issuers and underwriters when a financial intermediary concurrently lends to an issuer while also underwriting its public securities offering. We find issuers, particularly noninvestment‐grade issuers for whom informational economies of scope are likely to be large, benefit through lower underwriter fees and discounted loan yield spreads. Underwriters, both commercial banks as well as investment banks, engage in concurrent lending and provide price discounts, albeit in different ways. We find concurrent lending helps underwriters build relationships, increasing the probability of receiving current and future business.

This paper examines the broader effects of the US financial crisis on global lending to retail customers. In particular we examine retail bank lending in Germany using a unique data set of German savings banks during the period 2006 through 2008 for which we have the universe of loan applications and loans granted. Our experimental setting allows us to distinguish between savings banks affected by the US financial crisis through their holdings in Landesbanken with substantial subprime exposure and unaffected savings banks. The data enable us to distinguish between demand and supply side effects of bank lending and find that the US financial crisis induced a contraction in the supply of retail lending in Germany. While demand for loans goes down, it is not substantially different for the affected and nonaffected banks. More important, we find evidence of a significant supply side effect in that the affected banks reject substantially more loan applications than nonaffected banks. This result is particularly strong for smaller and more liquidity-constrained banks as well as for mortgage as compared with consumer loans. We also find that bank-depositor relationships help mitigate these supply side effects.

[This paper examines bank behavior in venture capital. It considers the relation between a bank's venture capital investments and its subsequent lending, which can be thought of as intertemporal cross-selling. Theory suggests that unlike independent venture capital firms, banks may be strategic investors who seek complementarities between venture capital and lending activities. We find evidence that banks use venture capital investments to build lending relationships. Having a prior relationship with a company in the venture capital market increases a bank's chance of subsequently granting a loan to that company. Companies can benefit from these relationships through more favorable loan pricing.]