Banks take costly actions (such as capitalization, liquidity holding, and advanced risk management) to avoid financial distress and creditor runs. While directly affecting a bank’s risks, such actions can also signal the bank’s fundamentals. We show that prudential regulations have an informational impact: sufficiently tight regulations can eliminate inefficient separating equilibria in banks’ signaling game, thereby changing the information available to creditors and their incentives to run. When accounting for this informational impact, tightening regulations can improve banks’ payoffs and be considered bank incentive-compatible. We support this novel, information-based rationale for regulations with evidence from the US liquidity requirement.

We investigate whether and how the environmental consciousness (greenness for short) of firms and banks is reflected in the pricing of bank credit. Using a large international sample of syndicated loans over the period 2011–2019, we find that green banks indeed reward firms for being green in the form of cheaper loans—however, only after the ratification of the Paris Agreement in 2015. Such loans are also more likely term loans, with fewer covenants and reflect firms' project choices. Thus, we find that environmental attitudes matter “when green meets green.”

We present a model of credit market competition to derive key hypotheses about how information sharing between banks influences the spatial clustering of their branches. We then test these hypotheses using data on 56,555 branches owned by 614 banks across 19 countries. We find that information sharing incentivizes banks to establish branches in localities that are new to them but that are already served by other banks. The resultant branch clustering is associated with reduced spatial credit rationing, as information sharing enables firms to access credit from more distant banks. These findings underscore how information sharing makes it more important for banks to move closer to each other rather than closer to their borrowers.