Jose Maria Liberti

The Anatomy of a Credit Supply Shock: Evidence from an Internal Credit Market

We investigate how financial contracting interacts with lending channel effects by tracing the anatomy of a credit supply shock using micro-level data from a multinational bank. Borrowers with stronger lending relationships, higher non-lending revenues, and those that pledge collateral, especially outside assets and real estate, experience less credit rationing. Consistent with a tightening of financing constraints post shock, borrower composition shifts toward larger and less risky firms, and loans exhibit higher collateralization rates. Our analysis highlights the value of relationships and suggests that relationship banking is a channel through which borrowers can mitigate lending channel effects.

Initiative, Incentives, and Soft Information

This paper examines how organizational form affects incentives inside a financial institution. Using unique organization-level data, I exploit a change to the hierarchical organization to test whether delegation of authority and reduction of oversight improve the provision of effort by loan officers. I find that empowering loan officers increases their effort in producing and using soft information in their lending decisions. Consistent with the incentive view of delegation, loan officers who receive more authority rely more on soft information relative to hard information in their decisions than those for whom authority is only partially or not delegated. The results shed light on the importance of organizational design for the production and use of soft information in financial institutions. This paper was accepted by Amit Seru, finance.

Economics of Voluntary Information Sharing

We show that lenders join a U.S. commercial credit bureau when information asymmetries between incumbents and entrants create an adverse selection problem that hinders market entry. Lenders also delay joining when information asymmetries protect them from competition in existing markets, consistent with lenders trading off new market entry against heightened competition. We exploit shocks to information coverage to show that lenders enter new markets after joining the bureau in a pattern consistent with this trade-off. Our results illuminate why intermediaries voluntarily share information and show how financial technology that mitigates information asymmetries can shape the boundaries of lending.