 Do Loan Officers' Incentives Lead to Lax Lending Standards?Itzhak Ben-David and Sumit Agarwal Working Paper Series from Ohio State University, Charles A. Dice Center for Research in Financial Economics Abstract: To understand better the role of loan officers' incentives in the origins of the financial crisis, we study a controlled field experiment conducted by a large bank. In the experiment, the incentive structure of a subset of small business loan officers was altered from fixed salary to volume-based pay. We use a diff-in-diff design to show that while the characteristics of loan applications did not change, incentive-paid loan officers book 19% loans with dollar amounts larger by 19%. We show that treated loan officers use their discretion more in the booking decision. Although loans booked by incentive-paid loan officers have better observable credit quality, they are 28% more likely to default. The increase in default is concentrated in loans that wouldn't have been booked in the absence of commission-based compensation, and in loans with excessive dollar amount. Our results support the idea that the explosion in mortgage volume during the housing bubble and the deterioration of underwriting standards can be partly attributed to the incentives of loan officers. JEL-codes: G01 G21 (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecl:ohidic:2012-07 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Paper Series from Ohio State University, Charles A. Dice Center for Research in Financial Economics Contact information at EDIRC. |
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