We show that banks manipulate the credit ratings of their borrowers before being compelled to share them with competing banks. Using a unique feature on the timing of information disclosure of a public credit registry, we disentangle the effect of manipulation from learning of credit ratings. We...

Information is a fundamental component of all financial transactions and markets, but it can arrive in multiple forms. We define what is meant by hard and soft information and describe the relative advantages of each. Hard information is quantitative, easy to store and transmit in impersonal...

Information is a fundamental component of all financial transactions and markets, but it can arrive in multiple forms. We define what is meant by hard and soft information and describe the relative advantages of each. Hard information is quantitative, easy to store and transmit in impersonal...

This paper provides evidence that lenders to a firm close to distress have incentives to coordinate: lower financing by one lender reduces firm creditworthiness and causes other lenders to reduce financing. To isolate the coordination channel from lenders' joint reaction to new information, we...

We present evidence that reassigning tasks among agents can alleviate moral hazard in communication. A rotation policy that routinely reassigns loan officers to borrowers of a commercial bank affects the officers' reporting behavior. When an officer anticipates rotation, reports are more...

This paper investigates the effect of a change in informational environment of borrowers on the organizational design of bank lending. We use micro-data from a large multinational bank and exploit the sudden introduction of a credit registry, an information-sharing mechanism across banks, for a...

We examine how developments in financial technology that improve information sharing affect lender specialization. Using the introduction of a U.S. commercial credit bureau, we document that lenders leverage their collateral expertise to enter new markets after joining. We exploit the staggered...

Collateral plays two roles. It may be used as an ex-ante commitment mechanism against agency risk or for hedging expected default risk. Using cross-country loan level data, we find that the commitment motive alone explains collateralization. Going from the lowest to highest quartile of ex-ante...