Firms’ innovative activities can be sensitive to public policies that affect the availability of capital. In this paper, we investigate the effects of regional and temporal variation in U.S. personal ...bankruptcy laws on firms’ innovative activities. We find that bankruptcy laws that provide stronger debtor protection decrease the number of patents produced by small firms. Stronger debtor protection also decreases the average quality, and variance in quality, of firms’ patents. We find evidence that the negative effect of stronger debtor protection on experimentation and innovation may be due to the decreased availability of external financing in response to stronger debtor rights, an effect amplified in industries with a high dependence on external financing. Hence, while it is typically assumed that stronger debtor protection encourages innovation by reducing the cost of failure for innovators, we show that it can instead dampen innovative activities by tightening the availability of external financing to innovative firms.
This paper was accepted by David Hsu, entrepreneurship and innovation
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We investigate what determines the maturity of lines of credit to small businesses. Our results provide strong support for the hypothesis that shorter loan maturities serve to mitigate the problems ...associated with borrower risk and asymmetric information that are typical of small business lending. We find that maturity is shorter for firm owners that have poor credit histories, are older, and less experienced, and for firms that are more informationally opaque. Supporting the notion that collateral and maturity are substitute mechanisms in mitigating agency problems, we also find strong evidence that maturity increases with collateral pledges, that personal collateral is associated with longer maturities than business collateral, and that collateral types that better mitigate agency problems reduce the sensitivity of loan maturity to informational asymmetries and risk. Finally, while it is argued that relationship lending may mitigate information asymmetry, we find no relation between loan maturity and stronger firm-creditor ties.
Abstract
We investigate how banks change the geographic distribution of their small business loan portfolio when they face political uncertainty in some of the states where they operate. Using ...exogenous variation in gubernatorial elections with binding term limits, we show that political uncertainty causes local banks to increase out‐of‐state lending to small firms, particularly those located in higher‐income areas. This effect follows a decrease in local lending and is stronger for banks that are more capital‐constrained. The increase in out‐of‐state credit leads to an increase in employment growth and net firm creation in sectors with larger capital needs.
We analyze the effect of deposit insurance on the risk-taking behavior of banks in the context of a quasi-natural experiment using detailed credit registry data. Using the case of an emerging ...economy, Bolivia, which introduced a deposit insurance system during the sample period, we compare the risk-taking behavior of banks before and after the introduction of this system. We find that in the post-deposit insurance period, banks are more likely to initiate riskier loans (i.e., loans with worse internal ratings at origination). These loans carry higher interest rates and are associated with worse ex-post performance (i.e., they have higher default and delinquency rates). Banks do not seem to compensate for the extra risk by increasing collateral requirements or decreasing loan maturities. We also find evidence that the increase in risk-taking is due to the decrease in market discipline from large depositors. Finally, differences between large (too-big-to-fail) and small banks diminished in the post-deposit insurance period.
We exploit state-level changes in the amount of personal wealth individuals can protect under Chapter 7 to analyze the effect of debtor protection on the financing structure and performance of a ...representative panel of U.S. startups. The effect of increasing debtor protection depends on the entrepreneur's level of wealth. Firms owned by mid-wealth entrepreneurs whose assets become fully protected suffer a reduction in credit availability, employment, operating efficiency, and survival rates. We find no such negative effects for low-wealth and high-wealth owners. Our results are consistent with theories that predict that asset protection in bankruptcy leads to a redistribution of credit.
Conventional wisdom holds that small banks have comparative advantages vis-a-vis large banks in serving small firms, while recent literature suggests this may not be the case. Using a panel of recent ...US start-ups, we investigate how small bank presence affects these firms in normal times (2004-06) and in the recent financial crisis (2007-09). We find that greater small bank presence yields significantly more lending to and slightly lower failure rates of these firms during normal times. However, these benefits disappear during the financial crisis, possibly because small banks are less diversified and benefit less from government guarantees than large banks.
The recent credit crisis and the increased internationalization of the European banks have given the debate about the role of national regulators a renewed urgency. We therefore investigate the ...determinants of bondholders’ abnormal returns for both domestic and cross-border bank merger announcements that involve European acquirers for the period 1998–2002. We find that bondholders’ abnormal returns are higher for Domestic Mergers than cross-border mergers, in direct contrast to evidence from equity prices where no difference is found. Further investigations in which we control for the changes in market power for example suggest this result may be indicative of investors perceiving Domestic Mergers as increasing the probability of a government bailout in case of distress. Banks’ bondholders also experience higher abnormal returns when the country of the partner bank has stricter rules in relation to forbearance of prudential regulations than the own country, and when functional diversification between lending and fee/trading activities increases.
We present evidence that the adjusted returns of merging banks’ bonds are positive and significant across pre-merger and announcement months. The cross-sectional evidence indicates that the primary ...determinants of merger-related bondholder gains are diversification gains, gains associated with achieving too-big-to-fail status, and, to a lesser degree, synergy gains. We obtain the same finding when we examine the acquiring banks’ credit spreads on new debt issues both before and after the merger. We also provide the first study that shows acquirers benefit by the lower cost of funds on post-merger debt issues.
In this paper we explore whether Turkish banks with worsening indicators of financial fragility were subject to market monitoring during the years leading to the 2000/2001 crisis, and how the quality ...and timeliness of the disclosure affect market reaction. We find that shareholders reacted negatively to indicators of financial fragility such as increases in maturity mismatches, currency mismatches, and non-performing loans, showing shareholders’ concerns about the impact of financial fragility indicators on future profits. We also find that audited statements that show larger reporting lags, are not informative, pointing to the need of improving their timeliness. Finally, our study suggests that the finding that securities prices react to financial fragility indicators should not be taken as sufficient evidence of banks’ safety and soundness.
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