Bank loans

We study the evolution of investment-banking relationships from 1933 to 2007. Relationship exclusivity and client concerns for the state of their banking relationships were strong through the first part of our sample period but then entered a period of sharp decline beginning around 1970. We interpret the bank-client relationship as an informal governance mechanism for curbing opportunistic behavior in a weak contracting environment and examine how technological change aggravated conflicts of interest within investment banks and between banks and their clients. This perspective sheds light on why trust between banks and their clients now appears to be in short supply.Received March 2, 2018; editorial decision June 11, 2018 by Editor Paolo Fulghieri.

Institutions often own equity in multiple firms that compete in the same product market. Prior research has shown that these institutional “common owners” induce anticompetitive pricing behavior in the airline industry. This paper reevaluates this evidence and shows that the documented positive correlation between common ownership and airline ticket prices stems from the market share component of the common ownership measure, and not the ownership and control components. We further show that the results are sensitive to measures of investor control and to assumptions about equity holders' ownership and control during bankruptcy.