This paper studies an economy in which firms can operate either a mature or a new technology and lenders acquire information on the productive assets of the borrowing firms that are eligible as collateral. We demonstrate that when contracts are imperfectly enforceable informed lenders offer inexpensive funding for the mature technology but may choose not to finance the new one, seeking to preserve the value of their information on the mature assets. Using firm-level data from Italy, we find that banks that establish long-term relationships with firms promote technological progress on average. However, we find that relationship banks inhibit innovations that entail a large depreciation of existing technology-specific information such as radical innovations.

In emerging economies, institutional and regulatory constraints can distort loan contracting and, hence, the incentives of lenders and borrowers. Studying the South Korean syndicated loan market, we find that during the 90s the safety net protecting business groups (chaebols)—especially the government’s bailout policy—affected the structure and pricing of loans to chaebol firms. However, after the chaebol reform of the late 90s dismantled the chaebol safety net, the differences in loan contracts between chaebol and non-chaebol firms narrowed or disappeared. The results suggest that the reform restored lenders’ incentives to monitor chaebol firms and properly assess their risk.

We investigate the impact of lenders' information sharing on firms' performance in the credit market using rich contract-level data from a U.S. credit bureau. The staggered entry of lenders into the bureau offers a natural experiment to identify the effect of lenders' improved access to information. Consistent with the predictions of Padilla and Pagano, 1997, Padilla and Pagano, 2000 and Pagano and Jappelli (1993), we find that information sharing reduces contract delinquencies and defaults, especially when firms are informationally opaque. The results also reveal that information sharing does not reduce the use of guarantees, that is, it may not loosen lending standards.

This paper empirically investigates the effect of “informed finance” on technological change. The theoretical literature offers conflicting predictions on whether the information of financiers fosters or inhibits firms’ innovation. Using data from a sample of Italian manufacturing firms, we find that the information of firms’ main banks, proxied by the duration of credit relationships, promotes innovation. This positive effect is economically and statistically more significant for product than for process innovations. Nonetheless, the role of relationship banks in innovation is quite unsophisticated: they do not foster internal research but rather fund the relevant investments that the introduction and acquisition of new technologies entails.

This paper investigates whether foreign banks help mitigate the effects of domestic liquidity shocks by exploiting a policy-induced shock to the U.S. wholesale market for liquidity and matched bank-syndicated loan data. We find that, following the 2011 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) regulatory change to the cost of wholesale liquidity, foreign banks, which faced a relatively positive liquidity shock, accumulated more reserves by engaging in liquidity hoarding, but did not expand their lending. These responses are more pronounced for foreign banks affiliated with complex global bank holding companies and whose parent banking systems experienced distress at the moment of the shock.

Using a rich sample of small and medium-sized European manufacturers, we investigate the nexus between banks’ relationship lending technologies and firms’ export activities during the 2009 great trade collapse. We find that the contraction of firms’ export was milder when banks had access to up-to-date “soft” information on firms’ export prospects. However, we find no evidence of an association between the resilience of firms’ export and banks’ experience on firms’ past activities. The nexus between export resilience and banks’ access to soft information is especially tight for young and small exporters and for firms at an early stage of internationalization.

A large literature emphasizes financial networks, but understanding how these networks influence lending decisions over the business cycle remains challenging. We exploit the overlapping bank portfolio structure of US syndicated loans to construct a financial network. Using techniques from spatial econometrics, we document large spillovers in lending conditions during good times, driven by commonality in banks’ loan portfolio exposures. A standard deviation increase in peers’ lending rates is associated with an increase in a bank’s lending rate of 17 basis points. However, these spillovers vanish in a large recession. We interpret these findings through a syndicate lending model where information spillovers driven by loan portfolio commonality dilute banks’ incentives to produce private information on borrowers during good times.

This paper studies the impact of financial structures and regulations on export dynamics using data from a large panel of countries over the 1997–2014 period. The results suggest that bank-oriented financial systems can boost the number of exporters more than market-oriented systems. However, especially in lower income countries with lax bank regulation, banks tend to reduce the dynamism of the export sector, slowing down exporters’ entry and exit. This reduced dynamism appears to reflect domestic banks’ protection of incumbent exporters more than banks’ screening of entrants or buffering of incumbents in difficult times. Foreign banks mitigate these effects, enhancing the dynamism of the export sector.