[The massive losses that banks incurred with the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market have raised concerns about their ability to continue lending to corporations. We investigate these concerns. We find that firms paid higher loan spreads during the subprime crisis. Importantly, the increase in loan spreads was higher for firms that borrowed from banks that incurred larger losses. These results hold after we control for firm-, bank-, and loan-specific factors, and account for endogeneity of bank losses. These findings, together with our evidence that borrowers took out smaller loans during the crisis when they borrowed from banks that incurred larger losses, lend support to the concerns about bank lending following their subprime losses.]

The presence of shadow banks in corporate term loan syndicates adversely affects credit lines’ liquidity provision, despite shadow banks not directly funding credit lines. Within the same syndicated loan deal, shadow banks attract not only riskier borrowers but also fewer banks as co-lenders, both in the term loan and in the credit line. Furthermore, credit lines in deals funded by shadow banks, compared to those without shadow bank participation, are smaller, with shorter maturities, and lower drawdown rates. Overall, our results highlight that syndicated loan deals with a strong presence of shadow banks offer borrowers lower liquidity protection. JEL G21, G22, G23

[We examine how bank capital and borrower bargaining power affect loan spreads. Consistent with previous studies, higher bank capital has a negative impact on loan rates, but borrower cash flow has a significant effect on this impact: compared with high-capital banks, lowcapital banks charge more for borrowers with low cash flow, but offer greater marginal discounts as these borrowers’ cash flow rises. These effects are largely focused on more bank-dependent borrowers. We find some evidence that low-capital banks charge a higher premium for bank-dependent borrowers’ systematic risk, but not for their total equity risk or default risk.]

The massive losses that banks incurred with the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market have raised concerns about their ability to continue lending to corporations. We investigate these concerns. We find that firms paid higher loan spreads during the subprime crisis. Importantly, the increase in loan spreads was higher for firms that borrowed from banks that incurred larger losses. These results hold after we control for firm-, bank-, and loan-specific factors, and account for endogeneity of bank losses. These findings, together with our evidence that borrowers took out smaller loans during the crisis when they borrowed from banks that incurred larger losses, lend support to the concerns about bank lending following their subprime losses. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

This paper investigates whether the institutional affiliation of a collateralized loan obligation (CLO) manager influences the manager's access to information and risk appetite. We find that CLO managers affiliated with banks start to sell off their positions in loans arranged by their bank well before the onset of default. In contrast, CLO managers affiliated with nonbanks do not lower their exposures to distressed loans. These findings are consistent with bank-affiliated CLO managers being more risk averse, but they could also derive from them having access to valuable information. On close inspection, we find that although bank-affiliated CLO managers are averse to holding any distressed loans, they are also more aggressive at divesting distressed loans arranged by their parent bank, suggesting that they benefit from an information wedge. Besides helping us understand CLO managers’ trading activities, our findings highlight a potential limit to banks’ ability to originate loans and distribute them via their affiliated CLOs.

Our study of the corporate loan pricing policies of U.S. banks over the past two decades shows that loan spreads for riskier firms become relatively lower during periods of monetary policy easing compared to tightening. This effect is driven by banks with greater risk appetite, measured from individual banks’ answers to the Senior Loan Officers Opinion Survey. Our results hold with different fixed effects that account for time-varying observed and unobserved heterogeneity of credit demand and bank lending conditions that are not directly related to monetary policy. Together with our survey-based measure of bank risk appetite, we provide compelling evidence of the presence of a bank risk-taking channel of monetary policy in the U.S.

This paper presents a theory of firm access to the bond market in which information gathering agencies are valuable but alter the relative cost of bond financing across firms and over the business cycle. The theory builds on the assumption that information frictions prevent these agencies from rating firms correctly all of the time. As a result, the cost of bond financing becomes dependent on the state of the economy and the “quality” of the signal provided by these agencies’ ratings. In addition, when the mix of bond issuers becomes riskier, as happens in recessions, bond financing becomes more expensive for mid-quality firms. Bond financing may even become more expensive to all firms, in which case mid-quality firms will be affected the most. The analysis of the bonds issued in the last two decades by American firms shows that split ratings, our proxy for the “quality” of the rating agencies’ signal, do not affect the relative cost of bond financing across firms in expansions, but they do increase the relative cost of this funding source for mid-credit quality issuers in recessions.

This paper uses an intermediation model to study the efficiency and welfare implications of both banks' minimum required capital–asset ratio and the regulation that limits, and in some countries forbids, banks' investments in the equity of nonfinancial firms. There are two sources of moral hazard in the model: one between the bank and the provider of deposit insurance, and the other between the bank and an entrepreneur who demands funds to finance an investment project. Among other things, the paper shows that capital regulation improves the bank's stability and can also be Pareto-improving. Equity regulation is never Pareto-improving and does not increase the bank's stability.

In this article, we show that when banks increase their use of wholesale funding they shorten the maturity of loans to corporations. This effect appears to be linked to banks’ exposure to rollover risk resulting from their increasing use of short-term uninsured funding. Banks that use more wholesale funding shorten both the maturity of newly issued loans and the maturity of their loan portfolios. These results are not present among banks that rely predominantly on insured deposits. The link between wholesale funding and loan maturity is robust, and holds when we include firm-year fixed effects, suggesting that the decline in loan maturity is bank driven. In line with this premise, we find that the slope of the loan yield curve becomes steeper for banks that use more wholesale funding and that borrowers turn to the bond market to raise funding with longer maturity in response to banks’ loan maturity shortening.

We consider a dynamic model in which receiving support from the lender of last resort (LLR) may help banks to weather investor runs. We show the need for regulatory liquidity standards when the underlying social trade-offs make the uninformed LLR inclined to support troubled banks during a run. Liquidity standards increase the time available before the LLR must decide on supporting the bank. This facilitates the arrival of information on the bank’s financial condition and improves the efficiency of the decision taken by the LLR, a role that can be modified but not replaced with the use of capital regulation.