We find that banks with capital and liquidity constraints are more likely to use credit risk transfer (CRT) instruments, including the credit derivative and the secondary loan markets. Relationship lenders and lead syndicate lenders are more likely to hold loans on their balance-sheets regardless of borrowers' riskiness. Finally, we find a separating equilibrium in the CRT market: loans to ex-ante riskier borrowers are more likely to be sold and loans to safer borrowers are more likely to be hedged with CDS. We view credit derivatives and loan sales as joint choice variables in determining the hedging instrument to use.

This paper examines the dynamic allocation of control rights in private debt contracts of firms. We show that a covenant violation in the prior loan contract implies a stigma for borrowers which results in stricter loan contract terms in subsequent new loan contracts. Our analyses reject potentially other explanations such as firm characteristics or agency problems between the lender and firm management, shareholders or public debtholders. After covenant violations in the prior contract, new loans have on average 18bps higher spreads and include more of those covenant types which also have been violated in the prior contract, with tighter thresholds.

This paper investigates trading patterns in target and acquirer firms prior to public announcement of M&A deals, a corporate event in which group based co-offence has been anecdotally documented. Our analysis differentiates whether such trading is primarily conducted by hedge funds with short-term investment horizons as opposed to other short horizon investors or hedge funds and institutional investors with long-term horizons, in both the equity and derivatives markets. Our results are consistent with exploitation of M&A deal related information prior to the deal's public announcement. In particular we find that the greater the likelihood of insider information leakage, the greater the short-term hedge fund holdings. We consider several alternative explanations, such as those related to the short-term hedge fund's skill in identifying profitable trades' ex-ante; our results seem inconsistent with such alternative explanations.

We analyze pricing differences between U.S. and European syndicated loans over the 1992–2014 period. We explicitly distinguish credit lines from term loans. For credit lines, U.S. borrowers pay significantly higher spreads, but lower fees, resulting in similar total costs of borrowing in both markets. Credit line usage is more cyclical in the United States, which provides a rationale for the pricing structure difference. For term loans, we analyze the channels of the cross-country loan price differential and document the importance of: the composition of term loan borrowers and the loan supply by institutional investors and foreign banks. Received September 18, 2015; editorial decision July 13, 2016 by Editor Philip Strahan.