Project monitoring and banking competition under adverse selection

We develop an analysis of ex ante monitoring of risky projects in banking. If protected from competition, banks are more concerned about not catching good risk projects when the perceived state of the economy improves, while they are more concerned about being induced to finance bad risk projects when conditions deteriorate. A monopoly bank provides the socially optimal ex ante monitoring of good risks, but is too conservative with regard to bad risks. Competition between banks is shown to undermine the incentives to avoid decision errors regarding both good and bad risk projects providing too limited monitoring effort from society's point of view.