Ozan Güler 

Working Papers

• Bank Specialization, Control Rights, and Real Effects, with Marco Giometti and Stefano Pietrosanti
  (R&R Management Science)

We study how lenders' industry expertise affects loan covenant design and enforcement. Using a large sample of U.S. corporate loans, we find that industry-specialized lenders impose less restrictive financial covenants and exhibit greater dispersion in contract terms. Following a covenant violation, borrowers financed by specialized banks experience smaller drops in investment without a decline in performance. Our results suggest that lenders improve contracting efficiency by leveraging industry-level knowledge, which is transferable across borrowers. 

• Heterogeneous Firing Costs, Worker Types, and Productivity: Evidence from a Natural Experiment, with Andrea Caggese, Mike Mariathasan, and Klaas Mulier 
  (R&R AEJ: Applied Economics)

We investigate how firing costs affect input choices and total factor productivity (TFP) by exploiting a labor reform in Belgium that increased firing costs of blue-collar workers relative to white-collar workers. Using a difference-in-differences design, we show that hiring and separations at blue-collar-intensive firms declined by 8 percent after the reform relative to white-collar-intensive firms. Moreover, blue-collar-intensive firms shifted workforce composition toward white-collar workers, offered fewer permanent contracts, and relied more on outsourced labor. We find no evidence of capital-intensive technology adoption and only little evidence of human capital investment. Ultimately, blue-collar-intensive firms experienced a 4.8 percent decline in TFP. 

• Who gets publicly guaranteed loans? The effect of guarantee fees on loan allocation and pricing, with Ilia Samarin
  (New version!)

We study how guarantee fees affect lending by exploiting the Belgian COVID-19 loan guarantee program, which charged lower fees to SMEs than to large firms. Using this size-based fee discontinuity in a regression discontinuity design, we show that large firms facing higher fees are more likely to obtain non-guaranteed loans that are cheaper than comparable guaranteed loans. Both banks and firms benefit from avoiding the fee: borrowers pay lower rates, and lenders retain part of the avoided fee as higher returns. Overall, fees discourage guaranteed lending and concentrate guaranteed loans among ex-ante riskier large firms, resulting in higher ex-post defaults.

• Strategically Small Firms and the Real Effects of Public Grants in a Crisis,  with Mircea Epure and Amedeo Pugliese

We investigate whether strategically small firms that avoid surpassing size-dependent regulations in non-crisis periods may have benefited more from public resources during crisis periods. We define strategically small firms as those positioning themselves below either of two thresholds: (i) €6 million revenues, implying less stringent tax and its oversight, or (ii) 50 employees, benefiting from looser labor laws and reduced financial disclosure. We document systematic firms' bunching below the revenues and employees thresholds, suggesting that these regulations may discourage firm growth. We do not observe similar behaviors at other thresholds for accounting and auditing requirements. We then show that these firms were more likely to obtain public funding during the crisis, relative to firms just above the thresholds. Despite accessing more public resources, strategically small firms do not outperform their counterparts in terms of growth or performance during and after the crisis. Overall, we document that size-dependent regulations generate strategically small firms whose behaviors in good times have unintended effects on public resource allocation in crisis times.

Publications

• The Real Effects of Banks' Corporate Credit Supply: A literature Review, Economic Inquiry (2021)

with Mike Mariathasan, Klaas Mulier, and Nejat Gokhan Okatan

In this article, we review the rapidly growing literature on the real effects of banks' corporate credit supply. We cover recent methodological advances and provide an in-depth survey of the existing evidence. The literature consistently shows that credit supply contractions lead to adverse real outcomes, but economic magnitudes vary across samples and identification strategies. This variation has become smaller in more recent work, using highly granular data. We further document heterogeneity in firm outcomes and show that the evidence is more ambiguous for expansionary shocks. Our analysis allows us to identify current knowledge gaps and worthwhile avenues for future research.

Work in Progress

• Misreporting and Guaranteed Loans, with Daniel Dejuan-Bitria, Mircea Epure, and Dmitry Khametshin