Staff Reports
The Effect of Bank Monitoring on Loan Repayment
Number 923
May 2020 Revised February 2022

JEL classification: G21, G32, H25, H32

Authors: Nicola Branzoli and Fulvia Fringuellotti

Monitoring is one of the main activities explaining the existence of banks, yet empirical evidence about its effect on loan outcomes is scant. Using granular loan-level information from the Italian Credit Register, we build a novel measure of bank monitoring based on banks’ requests for information on their existing borrowers and we investigate the effect of bank monitoring on loan repayment. We perform a causal analysis exploiting changes in the regional corporate tax rate as a source of exogenous variation in bank monitoring. Our identification strategy is supported by a theoretical model predicting that a decrease in the tax rate improves bank incentives to monitor borrowers by increasing returns from lending. We find that bank monitoring reduces the probability of a delinquency in a substantial way and the effect is stronger for the type of loans that benefit the most from bank oversight such as term loans.

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Author Disclosure Statement(s)
Nicola Branzoli
I declare that I have no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in the paper entitled "The Effect of Bank Monitoring on Loan Repayment." Prior to circulation, this paper was reviewed in accordance with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York review policy, available at https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/index.html.

Fulvia Fringuellotti
The author declares that she has no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper. Prior to circulation, this paper was reviewed in accordance with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York review policy, available at https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/index.html.
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