The Effect of Bank Monitoring on Loan Repayment

Nicola Branzoli and Fulvia Fringuellotti

No 923, Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: Monitoring is one of the main activities explaining the existence of banks, yet empirical evidence about its effect on loan outcomes is scant. Using granular loan-level information from the Italian Credit Register, we build a novel measure of bank monitoring based on banks’ requests for information on their existing borrowers and we investigate the effect of bank monitoring on loan repayment. We perform a causal analysis exploiting changes in the regional corporate tax rate as a source of exogenous variation in bank monitoring. Our identification strategy is supported by a theoretical model predicting that a decrease in the tax rate improves bank incentives to monitor borrowers by increasing returns from lending. We find that bank monitoring reduces the probability of a delinquency in a substantial way and that the effect is stronger for the types of loans that benefit most from bank oversight, such as term loans.

Keywords: bank monitoring; nonperforming loans; tax policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G21 G32 H25 H32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 63
Date: 2020-05-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban and nep-cfn
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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