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Loan Prospecting

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  • Florian Heider
  • Roman Inderst

Abstract

We analyze corporate lending when loan officers must be incentivized to prospect for loans and to transmit the soft information they obtain in that process. We explore how this multi-task agency problem shapes loan officers' compensation, banks' use of soft information in credit approval, and their lending standards. When competition intensifies, prospecting for loans becomes more important and banks' internal agency problems worsen. In response to more competition, banks lower lending standards, may choose to disregard soft and use only hard information in their credit approval, and in that case reduce loan officers to salespeople with steep, volume-based compensation. Our model generates "excessive lending" as banks' optimal response to an internal agency problem. The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Florian Heider & Roman Inderst, 2012. "Loan Prospecting," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 25(8), pages 2381-2415.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:25:y:2012:i:8:p:2381-2415
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    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/rfs/hhs051
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    Cited by:

    1. Shawn Cole & Martin Kanz & Leora Klapper, 2015. "Incentivizing Calculated Risk-Taking: Evidence from an Experiment with Commercial Bank Loan Officers," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 70(2), pages 537-575, April.
    2. Minkyung Kim & K. Sudhir & Kosuke Uetake & Rodrigo Canales, 2016. "Multidimensional Sales Incentives in CRM Settings: Customer Adverse Selection and Moral Hazard," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 2085, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    3. Agarwal, Sumit & Ben-David, Itzhak, 2018. "Loan prospecting and the loss of soft information," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 129(3), pages 608-628.
    4. Behr, Patrick & Drexler, Alejandro & Gropp, Reint & Guettler, Andre, 2020. "Financial Incentives and Loan Officer Behavior: Multitasking and Allocation of Effort under an Incomplete Contract," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 55(4), pages 1243-1267, June.
    5. Brown, Martin & Schaller, Matthias & Westerfeld, Simone & Heusler, Markus, 2015. "Internal Control and Strategic Communication within Firms – Evidence from Bank Lending," Working Papers on Finance 1504, University of St. Gallen, School of Finance, revised Jul 2015.
    6. Inderst, Roman & Hoffmann, Florian & Opp, Marcus, 2014. "Regulating Deferred Incentive Pay," CEPR Discussion Papers 9877, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    7. Hachem, Kinda, 2021. "Inefficiently low screening with Walrasian markets," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 935-948.
    8. Michele Benvenuti & Luca Casolaro & Silvia Del Prete & Paolo Emilio Mistrulli, 2017. "The Right to Decide and the Effective Control Over Small Business Lending Decisions: A Look into Loan Officers’ Real Authority," Economic Notes, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA, vol. 46(2), pages 237-268, July.
    9. Natalie Tiernan & Pedro Gete, 2014. "Overlending and Macroprudential Tools," 2014 Meeting Papers 379, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    10. Mosk, T.C., 2014. "Essays on banking," Other publications TiSEM d424ec24-1bfd-4be0-b19a-3, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.

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    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • G21 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Banks; Other Depository Institutions; Micro Finance Institutions; Mortgages
    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets

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