Essays on Banking and Corporate Finance

Abstract: This doctoral dissertation comprises three independent essays on banking and corporate finance. The essays are preceded by an introduction to the thesis. The first essay explores whether refinancing risk is an important determinant of debt-maturity decisions. To this end, it investigates how firms with refinancing risk choose the maturity of new loans they obtain during the 2007--2009 financial crisis. The firms' refinancing risk is measured by the maturing portion of outstanding long-term debt. The result shows that firms with a high refinancing risk choose longer maturities.The second essay examines the association between a lead arranger's relationship with a firm and its retained share in the loan to that firms. While some literature indicates that lending relationships can help to alleviate ex post agency conflicts, others imply that relationship lead arrangers may use their information advantage to exploit syndicate participants. Using syndicated loans made to U.S. firms, this article shows that lead arrangers retain a smaller share in lending relationships with firms. The third essay (co-authored with Jens Forssbaeck) examines the relationship between collateral and credit rationing. In theory, the use of collateral in credit contracting should mitigate the information problems that are widely held to be the primary cause of credit rationing. However, direct empirical evidence on this link is scant. Using survey data that provides clean measures of quantity and loan size rationing, our results suggest that collateral reduces the likelihood of experiencing loan-size credit rationing.