Strong lending relationships between banks and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a key role in the bank-based financial system of Germany. So far, they have been mainly described by the notion of a housebank and transactional features of long-term bank-customer relationships. In...

Although there has been an intensive debate on the relative merits of different systems of corporate governance, empirical evidence on the link between corporate governance and firm performance almost exclusively refers to the market-oriented Anglo-Saxon system. This paper therefore investigates...