Survey_BK_2

Abstract

The study relies on the CFS Loan Data Set, collected under the Center for Financial Studies’ field research project on Credit Management. The data underlying our analysis include corporate debtors of five major German banks, three of them are private listed firms, one is a public sector institution, and one is a cooperative bank. The unit of observation is a particular borrowing firm or, more specifically, a particular bank borrower relationship, using all the information regarding the borrowing firm contained in the credit files of a bank. This information was collected directly from the banks’ credit files. Observations range from January 1992 to January 1997. The sample was drawn randomly from a population of all those corporate customers who fulfilled the following set of conditions at least once during this time span.