Bank Equity Stakes in Borrowing Firms and Financial Distress

Mitchell Berlin, Kose John and Anthony Saunders

The Review of Financial Studies, 1996, vol. 9, issue 3, 889-919

Abstract: We derive the optimal financial claim for a bank when the borrowing firm's uninformed stake-holders depend on the bank to establish whether the firm is distressed and whether concessions by stakeholders are necessary. The bank's financial claim is designed to ensure that it cannot confide with a healthy firm's owners to seek unnecessary concessions or to collude with a distressed firm's owners to claim that the firm is healthy. To prove that a request for concessions has not come from a healthy firm/bank coalition, the bank must hold either a very small or a very large equity stake when the firm enters distress. To prove that a distressed firm and the bank have not colluded to claim that the firm is healthy, the bank may need to hold equity under routine financial conditions. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.

Date: 1996
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (55)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.jstor.org/fcgi-bin/jstor/listjournal.fcg/08939454 full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to JSTOR subscribers. See http://www.jstor.org for details.

Related works:
Working Paper: Bank equity stakes in borrowing firms and financial distress (1995)
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:9:y:1996:i:3:p:889-919

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Financial Studies is currently edited by Itay Goldstein

More articles in The Review of Financial Studies from Society for Financial Studies Oxford University Press, Journals Department, 2001 Evans Road, Cary, NC 27513 USA.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().