The impact of lending relationship on risk premium and credit availability: evidence from Tunisia

Meryem Bellouma, Abdelwahed Omri and Sami Bennaceur

Afro-Asian Journal of Finance and Accounting, 2009, vol. 1, issue 3, pages 235-250

Abstract: This paper presents empirical evidence from a representative sample of Tunisian firms on the importance of loan officers in the production of 'soft information' by opposition of 'hard' information, testing whether firm borrowers have a relationship with their bank or with their loan officer. To establish the main determinants of the credit conditions in Tunisia, our study is based on a sample of 297 companies, dealing with a Tunisian bank from 1998 to 2002. The main finding of this paper is that the risk premium depends only on the hard information proxies. However, the availability of credit seems related to the interaction between the loan officer and the customer through the collection of 'soft' information.

Keywords: lending relationship; risk premium; credit availability; panel data; Tobit model; Tunisia; loan officers; banking; bank loans (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009

Downloads: (external link)
http://inderscience.metapress.com/link.asp?target= ... &id=N67R3718L2881MGU (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mes:afasfa:v:1:y:2009:i:3:p:235-250

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Afro-Asian Journal of Finance and Accounting from Inderscience Enterprises Ltd
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().