IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bno/worpap/2019_09.html

Collateral damaged? Priority structure, credit supply, and firm performance

Author

Listed:
  • Geraldo Cerqueiro

    (Católica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics)

  • Steven Ongena

    (University of Zürich, Swiss Finance Institute, KU Leuven and CEPR)

  • Kasper Roszbach

    (Norges Bank and University of Groningen)

Abstract

A unique legal reform in 2004 in Sweden redistributed collateral rights from banks holding floating liens to unsecured creditors without changing the value of assets on firms' balance sheets. Using a country-wide panel of all incorporated firms, we document that a zero-sum redistribution of collateral rights and the resulting reduction in collateral capacity towards banks contracts the amount and maturity of corporate debt and leads firms to slow investment and forego growth. Altering their allocation of assets, firms reduce particularly those assets with a low collateralizable value for banks and also hoard more cash. However, the reform has no impact on corporate capital intensity or efficiency, suggesting that under these newly binding credit constraints firms simply shrink their operations.

Suggested Citation

  • Geraldo Cerqueiro & Steven Ongena & Kasper Roszbach, 2019. "Collateral damaged? Priority structure, credit supply, and firm performance," Working Paper 2019/9, Norges Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:bno:worpap:2019_09
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.norges-bank.no/en/news-events/news-publications/Papers/Working-Papers/2019/92019/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Ongena, Steven & Saffar, Walid & Sun, Yuan & Wei, Lai, 2025. "Movables as collateral and corporate credit: Loan-level evidence from legal reforms across Europe," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 170(C).
    3. Allen, Franklin & Qian, Meijun & Xie, Jing, 2022. "Implicit benefits and financing," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 52(C).
    4. Bunderson, Stuart & Thakor, Anjan V., 2022. "Higher purpose, banking and stability," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 140(C).
    5. Krahnen, Jan Pieter & Lindblom, Ted & Lucas, Deborah & Olsson, Magnus & Fulghieri, Paolo & Thakor, Anjan, 2025. "Value creation and stability in financial services: How should we regulate banks?," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 63(C).
    6. Lo, Andrew W. & Thakor, Richard T., 2023. "Financial intermediation and the funding of biomedical innovation: A review," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 54(C).
    7. Uesugi, Iichiro & Miyakawa, Daisuke & Hosono, Kaoru & Ono, Arito & Uchida, Hirofumi, 2025. "The collateral channel versus the bank lending channel: Evidence from a massive earthquake," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 170(C).
    8. Ioannidou, Vasso & Pavanini, Nicola & Peng, Yushi, 2022. "Collateral and asymmetric information in lending markets," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 144(1), pages 93-121.
    9. Boot, Arnoud & Hoffmann, Peter & Laeven, Luc & Ratnovski, Lev, 2021. "Fintech: what’s old, what’s new?," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 53(C).
    10. Choudhary, M. Ali & Jain, Anil, 2022. "Finance and inequality: The distributional impacts of bank credit rationing," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 52(C).
    11. Anjan V. Thakor, 2023. "Finance research: What are the new frontiers?," The Financial Review, Eastern Finance Association, vol. 58(3), pages 453-462, August.
    12. Atanas Kolev & Laurent Maurin & Matthieu Segol, 2022. "What Makes Firms Dissatisfied with Their Bank Loans: New Evidence from Survey Data," Journal of Financial Services Research, Springer;Western Finance Association, vol. 61(3), pages 407-430, June.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D22 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior: Empirical Analysis
    • G31 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Capital Budgeting; Fixed Investment and Inventory Studies
    • G32 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Financing Policy; Financial Risk and Risk Management; Capital and Ownership Structure; Value of Firms; Goodwill

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bno:worpap:2019_09. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nbgovno.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.