This article investigates how cross-selling affects relationship lending using internal data from a large bank and the Swedish credit registry. I show that within a bank–firm relationship, profit earned from non-loan products cross-subsidizes loans and increases (1) credit supply and (2) the likelihood of the bank’s pausing or waiving interest payments for delinquent loans (lenience in delinquency). For identification, I exploit the Basel II-induced exogenous variation in products’ profitability while holding constant the firm’s creditworthiness and relationship informativeness. I find that the average affected firm experienced a decrease of 6 percent ($400,000) in credit supply and 30 percent (9.8 pp) in lenience in delinquency. The results highlight the importance of cross-subsidization as a mechanism through which cross-selling affects bank–firm relationships and inform optimal regulatory design for lenders who multi-produce.

We introduce a high quality proxy for bank misconduct that is constructed from Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) complaint data. We employ this proxy to measure the impact of bank misconduct on the expansion of online lending in the United States. Using nearly complete loan and application data from the online lending market, we demonstrate that bank misconduct is associated with a statistically and economically significant increase in online lending demand at the state and county levels. This result is robust to the inclusion of bank credit supply shocks and holds for both broader and more narrowly-defined bank misconduct measures. Furthermore, we show that this effect is strongest for lower rated borrowers and weakest in states with high levels of generalized trust.