Finally, another issue, which has aroused a considerable amount of interest in the literature, is the role of the bank-customer relationship in credit risk. Non-financial companies can benefit from close relationships with banks through easier access to credit, in terms of both the amount of credit they can obtain and how much it costs them, the protection they have during recession and even an implicit insurance of the cost of finance [Petersen and Rajan (1994)]. The close bank-customer relationship may produce informational rents for the bank [Sharpe (1990) and Rajan (1992)] enabling it to exercise a certain degree of market.
