I examine how credit reporting affects where firms access credit and how lenders contract with them. I use within firm-time and lender-time tests that exploit lenders joining a credit bureau and sharing information in a staggered pattern. I find information sharing reduces relationship-switching costs, particularly for firms that are young, small, or have had no defaults. After sharing, lenders transition away from relationship contracting, in two ways: contract maturities in new relationships are shorter, and lenders are less willing to provide financing to their delinquent borrowers. My results highlight the mixed effects of transparency-improving financial technologies on credit availability.

Costello, Down, and Mehta (2020) trace their slider intervention to deviations from the credit line amount recommended by a credit scoring model. The deviations are followed by larger delinquency declines and bigger sales orders, and Costello et al. interpret these results using discretion-based theories. However, incremental deviations are concentrated on newer clients rather than those the lender has accumulated soft information about. Deviations also appear larger for public than private borrowers. My discussion evaluates whether these results align with discretion-based theories, and explores alternative interpretations based on salience and unique aspects of the trade credit setting. Differences in interpretation aside, the evidence is informative about technological advances in commercial lending. I conclude with an overview of several recent advances and discuss the implications for lending research.

We examine how a fixed capital supply shortage affects firm investment. Using equipment transaction–level data, we find pandemic-driven production disruptions significantly altered capital reallocation patterns across firms. A surge in used capital trading activity softened the investment decline, as firms acquired used capital from distant and dissimilar counterparts. Younger firms were disproportionately affected even though they rarely purchase new capital: while in normal times older firms sell their capital to younger firms, following a supply shortage, older firms compete for used capital, pricing out younger firms. Our evidence highlights the crucial role of secondary markets and distributive externalities for corporate investment.

Abstract We study how small and medium enterprise (SME) lenders react to information about their competitors’ contracting decisions. To isolate this learning from lenders’ common reactions to unobserved shocks to fundamentals, we exploit the staggered entry of lenders into an information-sharing platform. Upon entering, lenders adjust their contract terms toward what others offer. This reaction is mediated by the distribution of market shares: lenders with higher shares or that operate in concentrated markets react less. Thus, contract terms are shaped not only by borrower or lender fundamentals but also by the interaction between information availability and competition.

Using a data set that records banks’ ongoing requests of information from small commercial borrowers, we examine when banks use financial statements to monitor borrowers after loan origination. We find that banks request financial statements for half the loans and this variation is related to borrower credit risk, relationship length, collateral, and the provision of business tax returns, but in complex ways. The relation between borrower risk and financial statement requests has an inverted U-shape; and tax returns can be both substitutes and complements to financial statements, conditional on borrower characteristics and the degree of bank–borrower information asymmetry. Frequent financial reporting is used to monitor collateral, but only for non–real estate loans and only when the collateral is easily accessible to lenders. Collectively, our results provide novel evidence of a fundamental information demand for financial reporting in monitoring small commercial borrowers and a specific channel through which banks fulfill their role as delegated monitors.

Lending concentration features prominently in models of information acquisition by banks, but empirical evidence on its role is limited. Using bank-level loan exposures, we find banks are less likely to collect audited financial statements from firms in industries and regions in which they have more exposure. These findings are stronger in settings in which adverse selection is acute and muted when the bank lacks experience with an exposure. Our results offer novel evidence on how bank characteristics are related to the type of financial information they use and support theoretical predictions suggesting portfolio concentration reveals a bank's relative expertise.

ABSTRACT We use a proprietary data set of financial statements collected by banks to examine whether economic growth is related to the use of financial statement verification in debt financing. Exploiting the distinct economic growth and contraction patterns of the construction industry over the years 2002–2011, our estimates reveal that banks reduced their collection of unqualified audited financial statements from construction firms at nearly twice the rate of firms in other industries during the housing boom period before 2008. This reduction was most severe in the regions that experienced the most significant construction growth. These trends reversed during the subsequent housing crisis in 2008–2011 when construction activity contracted. Moreover, using bank‐ and firm‐level data, we find a strong negative (positive) relation between audited financial statements during the growth period, and subsequent loan losses (construction firm survival) during the contraction period. Collectively, our results reveal that macroeconomic fluctuations produce temporal shifts in the overall level of financial statement verification and temporal shifts in verification are related to bank loan portfolio quality and borrower performance.

We study the consequences of a 2010 change in the investment adviser qualification exam that reallocated coverage from the rules and ethics section to the technical material section. Comparing advisers with the same employer in the same location and year, we find those passing the exam with more rules and ethics coverage are one-fourth less likely to commit misconduct. The exam change appears to affect advisers’ perception of acceptable conduct and not just their awareness of specific rules or selection into the qualification. Those passing the rules and ethics-focused exam are more likely to depart employers experiencing scandals. Such departures also predict future scandals. Our paper offers the first archival evidence on how rules and ethics training affects conduct and labor market activity in the financial sector.

We use the introduction of a U.S. commercial credit bureau to study when lenders adopt voluntary information sharing technology and the resulting consequences for competition and credit access. Our results suggest that lenders trade off access to new markets against heightened competition for their own borrowers. Lenders that initially do not adopt lose borrowers to competitors that do, which ultimately compels them to adopt and leads to the formation of an information sharing system. Access to credit improves but only for high-quality borrowers in markets with greater lender adoption. We provide the first direct evidence on when financial intermediaries adopt information sharing technologies and how sharing systems form and evolve.