Financial Crises and the Organization of Syndicate Leadership

We study how financial crises reshape the internal organization of syndicated lending by reallocating syndicate leadership. Using facility-level data on syndicated loans from 1995 to 2019, we examine how crisis periods affect syndicate structure, lead arranger turnover, and the quality of borrower-arranger matches.We show that crises are associated with systematic changes in syndicate organization and lower rates of lead arranger switching, indicating greater leadership stability under stress. Although high-reputation arrangers are less likely to be replaced, their stabilizing role operates primarily through syndicate organization and persistent borrower-arranger relationships rather than through a direct crisis-specific interaction. When leadership turnover does occur, crises materially impair match quality. Conditional on switching, borrowers are significantly less likely to upgrade to higher-reputation arrangers during crisis periods, highlighting frictions in reallocating leadership under stress. Overall, the results show that financial crises affect syndicated lending not only by disrupting credit supply, but by reshaping the allocation and quality of leadership within loan syndicates.