This paper examines the firms’ credit availability during the 2007–2009 financial crisis using a dataset of 5331 bank–firm relationships provided by borrowers’ credit folders of three Italian banks. It aims to test whether a strong lender–borrower relationship can produce less credit rationing for borrowing firms even during a credit crunch period. The results show that exclusivity of the relationship can mitigate the firm credit rationing. We also verify the influence of lending organizational structure during crisis. A new measure of distance in lending technologies has been introduced: the hierarchical distance calculated as the distance between the branch that originates the loan and the location of the hierarchical level responsible for financing decision. Our findings document a negative impact of distance on credit availability, consistent with the idea that proximity facilitates the transmission of soft information.

Enforcement actions (sanctions) aim to penalize guilty companies and provide examples to other companies that bad behavior will be penalized. A handful of papers analyze the consequences of sanctions in banking for sanctioned companies, while no papers have investigated the spillover effects on non-sanctioned banks. Focusing on credit-related sanctions, we show the existence of a spillover effect: non-sanctioned banks behave similar to sanctioned banks, depending on their degree of similarity, offloading problematic loans and reducing their lending activity.