【正文】 nez, Salas and Saurina (2020) directly test the adverse selection and moral hazard hypotheses by separating exante and expost measures of borrower riskiness, namely defaults prior to and after the loan origination. Their results suggest that although observed riskiness increases the likelihood that collateral is used, there is also a negative association between collateral and default after the loan has been granted, which is consistent with the adverse selection argument. It should be noted that theories of collateral as a solution to moral hazard and/or adverse selection problems assume collateral is external to the firm. Unfortunately, our measure of the incidence of collateral does not distinguish between firm (inside) collateral and personal (outside) collateral. Hence, throughout our analysis, we will assume that collateral is mostly inside, but allow for the fact that there may also be some 英文原文 6 outside collateral. As for personal guarantees, they clearly represent outside collateral. Recent research on collateral also discusses how collateral affects lenders’ incentives with regard to information production, that is, the screening of borrowers’ quality and the monitoring of their performance. These theories of the effect of collateral on lenders’ incentives apply to both inside and outside collateral. Manove, Padilla, and Pagano (2020), for instance, argue that, from banks’ point of view, collateral can be considered as a substitute for the evaluation of the actual risk of a borrower. Thus, banks that are highly protected by collateral may perform less screening of the projects they finance than is socially optimal. However, several theoretical studies argue that collateral may plement lenders’ screening and monitoring activities. In the presence of other claimants, lenders’ incentive to monitor borrowers is reduced due to the informational freerider problem. In order to enhance lenders’ incentive to monitor, loan contracts must be structured in a way that makes lenders’ payoff sensitive to borrowers’ financial health. Rajan and Winton (1995) argue that collateral may serve as a contractual device to increase lenders’ monitoring incentive, because collateral is likely to be effective only if its value can be monitored. Moreover, the use of collateral as an incentive will be more extensive when the value of such collateral (as in the case of accounts receivable and inventories, for example) depreciates rapidly if business conditions deteriorate, than when the value of collateral is relatively stable (as in the case of, ., real estate). Longhofer and Santos (2020) argue that collateral serves as an incentive for information production by the principal lender in the presence of several creditors, because taking collateral is effective in making its loan senior to other creditors’ cl。 Sharpe, 1990). Existing empirical research has yet to reach decisive conclusions about the nature of these relationships. This paper seeks to contribute to the existing literature on collateral using a unique firmlevel data set of the small and medium sized enterprise (SME) loan market in Japan. Explicitly differentiating physical collateral (such as real estate) and personal guarantees by business representatives, we investigate how the use of collateral and personal guarantees affects the incentives of borrowers, lenders, and the relationship between them. More specifically, we examine the following three issues. First, we examine whether riskier borrowers are more likely to be required to provide collateral or personal guarantees. Second, we investigate how collateral and personal guarantees affect banks’ monitoring of borrowers. Third, we examine the correlation between the use of collateral and personal guarantees on the one hand and the closeness of borrowerlender relationships on the other. The data set we employ is based mainly on the “Survey of the Financial Environment” (SFE) conducted by the Small and Medium Enterprise Agency of Japan in October 2020. In order to focus on firms that mostly depend on bank loans for their financing, we limit the sample to firms satisfying the legal definition of an SME in Japan. We then bine the SFE data for each SME with information on their main bank obtained from the bank’s financial statements in order to control for lender characteristics as well. Furthermore, to control for the effect of government credit guarantees on collateral and personal guarantees, in the main analysis of this paper we exclude from the sample all firms that enjoyed any form of government credit guarantee. As a result of this screening process, we end up with a sample of 1,702 firms. Our main findings can be summarized as follows. We find that firms’ riskiness does not have a significant effect on the likelihood that collateral is used. Thus, we cannot find firm evidence that the use of collateral mitigates moral hazard. We find, however, that banks whose claims 英文原文 4 are collateralized monitor borrowers more intensively, and that borrowers who have a longterm relationship with their main bank are more likely to pledge collateral. These findings suggest that collateral is plementary to relationship lending. In contrast, the plementarity between relationship lending and personal guarantees is weaker. As far as we know, this is the first empirical study that systematically examines the role of collateral and personal guarantees in Japan’s SME loan market. The two main contributions of the paper are as follows. First, given that Japan is generally considered to have a relationshipbased financial system in which the relationshiplender, the main bank, plays a central role in corporate financing (Rajan and Zingales, 2020), the study helps to improve our understanding of the role of collateral in relationship lending and plements