We explore whether the introduction of transparent reporting rules increases credit standard harmonization within a bank. We exploit the new loan-level reporting rules imposed on banks that borrow from the European Central Bank using repurchase agreements collateralized by their asset-backed securities. We compare credit terms of similar mortgages issued by a bank across a country's regions and find that harmonization increases following the adoption of the new reporting rules. Learning and regulatory scrutiny constitute mechanisms underlying this economic effect. We also show that harmonization leads to more favorable lending terms to borrowers and higher loan quality for banks. Overall, these findings suggest that transparent reporting rules incentivize banks to improve their internal decision-making and thereby reduce regional divergence in their credit standards.

We use novel satellite data that track the number of cars in the parking lots of 92,668 stores for 71 publicly listed U.S. retailers to study the local information advantage of institutional investors. We establish car counts as a timely measure of store‐level performance and find that institutional investors adjust their holdings in response to the performance of local stores, and that these trades are profitable on average. These results suggest that local investors have an advantage when processing information about nearby operations. However, some institutional investors do not adjust for the quality of their local information and continue to rely on local signals even when they are poor predictors of firm performance and returns. This overreliance on poor local information is reduced for institutional investors with greater industry expertise and those with greater incentives to maximize short‐term trading profits.