Relationships between large customers and suppliers expose lenders to additional risks. These risks may force lead agents to retain a larger share of syndicated loans, reducing loan-level diversification, and, in turn, increasing the required interest rate spread. Consistent with this view, we find that borrowers' dependence on a few larger customers or suppliers positively affects the cost of the loans indirectly through the loan structure. Instead, we do not observe a direct cost associated with large customer-supplier links, suggesting that lead agents do not increase the interest rate spread as compensation for the additional risks of dealing with borrowers with large customer-supplier links per se. Finally, we document an inverted U-shaped relationship between the length of the large customer-supplier link and the loan share held by the lead agent.

This paper examines the bank productivity growth and integration process for the 28 EU countries during three main phases of the financial crisis: the U.S. subprime crisis (2007–2008), the global financial crisis (2009–2010) and the sovereign debt crisis (2010–2012). We extend the Malmquist Productivity Index by applying an additive two-stage DEA model. This allows us to explore the sources of growth in different stages of production. Furthermore, we assess the integration of European banks by analyzing the β-convergence and σ-convergence of the two-stage Productivity Index. Our results show a productivity growth during the U.S. subprime crisis, but a consistent decline during the global financial crisis. The loss of competitiveness of the European banking system is due to the drop in growth of the performance stage and technical change. Finally, we find a strong convergence pattern during the financial crisis, mainly driven by the catch up process of some Eastern countries and the drop in performance of Western countries.

This paper addresses the question, “Does lenders’ culture affect their monitoring efforts and style?”, by exploring whether lender individualism affects the loan monitoring of U.S. borrowers for a sample of 27,164 syndicated loan facilities granted between 1998 and 2017. We proxy lender individualism based on the ancestral country of origin of the lead bank's CEO. We show that lender individualism leads to a less stringent monitoring style. We find that individualist lenders resort less to covenant monitoring, impose less strict contract terms, such as performance pricing and rely more on soft information. We also provide evidence that individualist lenders retain a larger loan share and deal with a larger number of lenders. Finally, we find that some governance characteristics (board size and percentage of female directors) and other CEO features (cash compensation, tenure, and non-duality) moderate the negative association between lender individualism and loan monitoring.

Does a decrease in shareholder litigation enhance managers’ monitoring efforts by ensuring adequate firm risk management? We explore how state universal demand (UD) laws (which limit shareholder litigation as a mechanism to discipline managers), affect bank holding companies’ (BHCs) risk. Using a difference-in-differences analysis, we show that BHCs reduce their tail risk exposures after the implementation of UD laws, which is achieved by improving loan asset quality. Indeed, BHCs appear to apply stricter contract terms for syndicate loans to risky and opaque borrowers. We also show that UD law implementation leads to changes in BHC board composition by increasing the proportion of outside directors, the number of independent directors in audit committees and the number of independent directors with financial expertise.