Inside bank premiums as liquidity insurance

This paper estimates inside bank premiums arising from relationship banking and identifies the primary mechanism causing them among competing extant theories. Our empirical results using a dataset that is primarily based on a survey that we designed show that inside bank premiums are economically significant with an average of 68–71 basis points for short-term loans. The subsample regressions show that these premiums are more likely to result from the provision of implicit insurance or flexibility in renegotiation by the inside bank and that they are more significant for firms whose inside banks are larger, those with a lower capital to asset ratio, or those in more concentrated loan markets.