“…Dependent variables. Following prior research (Anderson & Makhija, 1999;Hoshi, Kashyap, & Scharfstein, 1993;Wu, Sercu, & Yao, 2001), we considered all bank loans to be relational debt and all bonds to be transactional debt. As Aoki and Patrick (1994) noted, a main bank leads a de facto lending syndicate and monitors firms on behalf of all other lenders, so it is appropriate to treat all bank loans as relational debt.…”