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Working Paper
On the profitability and cost of relationship lending
The authors provide some preliminary evidence on the costs and profitability of relationship lending by commercial banks. Drawing on recent research that has identified loan rate smoothing as a significant element in lending relationships between banks and firms, the authors carry out a two-stage procedure. In the first stage, the authors derive bank-specific measures of the extent to which the banks in their sample engage in loan rate smoothing for small business borrowers in response to exogenous shocks to their credit risk. In the second stage, the authors estimate cost and (alternative) ...
Journal Article
New rules for foreign banks: what's at stake?
In response to the financial crisis, stricter rules are being phased in for foreign banks operating on U.S. soil. Mitchell Berlin explains how global banking drives efficiency, how the new rules may impede that efficiency, and why the rules may nevertheless be necessary.
Journal Article
Banks and markets: substitutes, complements, or both?
In traditional banking arrangements, households hold their savings in the form of deposits at the bank, which makes loans to both firms and households and holds these loans to maturity. But in the United States, and to a lesser extent in other developed countries, markets have increasingly taken over the roles traditionally played by banks. The shift of financing activity from banks to financial markets, as well as their continued coexistence, raises a number of questions. In this article, Mitchell Berlin discusses some of these questions, such as: What factors determine the relative ...
Working Paper
Debt covenants and renegotiation
Working Paper
Optimal financial contracts for large investors: the role of lender liability
This paper explores the optimal financial contract for a large investor with potential control over a firm's investment decisions. The authors show that an optimally designed menu of claims for a large investor will include features resembling a U.S. version of lender liability doctrine, equitable subordination. This doctrine permits a firm's claimants to seek to subordinate a controlling investor's financial claim in bankruptcy court, but only under well-specified conditions. Specifically, the authors show that this doctrine allows a firm to strike an efficient balance between two concerns: ...
Working Paper
Courts and contractual innovation: a preliminary analysis
The authors explore a model in which agents enter into a contract but are uncertain about how a judge will enforce it. The judge can consider a wide range of evidence, or instead, use a rule-based method of judgment that relies on limited information. The authors focus on the following tradeoff: Considering a wide range of evidence increases the likelihood of a correct ruling in the case at hand but undermines the formation of precedents that resolve legal uncertainty for subsequent agents. ; In a model of contractual innovation, they show that the use of evidence increases the likelihood of ...
Journal Article
Jack of all trades? Product diversification in nonfinancial firms
While financial firms keep searching for the secret formula to make profits out of providing multiple financial services under one roof, nonfinancial firms seem headed in the opposite direction. What can financial firms learn from the experience of diversified nonfinancial firms and those firms that have increased their focus? Mitchell Berlin examines this question and offers some possible explanations as to why nonfinancial firms have found it so hard to profit from diversification.
Journal Article
Can we explain banks' capital structures?
Bank capital has been much in the news during the recent financial crisis. In 2008 and 2009 the U.S. government injected $235 billion of capital into the banking system as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). In 2009, bank regulators carried out a full-scale evaluation of the capital adequacy of 19 large banking organizations, ultimately requiring 10 of these organizations to increase their capital levels. While most commentators agree that regulatory capital levels are too low for large organizations ? especially large organizations that create systemic risks ? financial ...
Journal Article
Should business bankruptcy be a one-chapter book?
Mitchell Berlin raises the question "Should Business Bankruptcy Be a One-Chapter Book?" The answer, in part, depends on the answers to other questions: What makes more economic sense? A bankruptcy system that auctions a firm's assets and distributes the proceeds among the creditors? Or one that allows the firm to seek to resume business after renegotiations between its stockholders and its creditors? Or is there room?or even a need?for both?
Working Paper
The choice between bonds and bank loans