Strategic bank monitoring and firms’ debt structure

Abstract

Firms choose debt structure and competing banks choose monitoring intensity. Monitoring improves credit allocation, but creates informational lock-in effects in bank-borrower relationships. In a competitive credit market, banks dissipate anticipated profit from serving locked-in borrowers subsequently revealed to the bank as good to attract new borrowers with unknown credit quality. Consequently, banks’ lending strategies result in cross-subsidies from good to bad borrowers. We investigate how firms’ choice of debt structure interacts with the cross-subsidies inherent in banks’ lending strategies. The analysis sheds light on how dynamic bank competition determines monitoring intensity, seniority, and maturity structure in bank dependent industries.