Relationship lending is conventionally interpreted as a strong partnership between a lender and a borrower. Nevertheless, we still lack consensus regarding how to quantify a lending relationship while simple statistics such as the frequency and volume of loans have been frequently used. Here, we propose the concept of a significant tie to statistically evaluate the strength of a relationship. Application of the proposed method to the Italian interbank networks reveals that the percentage of relationship lending among all bilateral trades is consistently around 20%-30% and that their trading properties are distinct from those of transactional trades.
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