Bank regulations and loan contracts

This study examines empirically how bank regulations adopted in lender countries influence the characteristics of loan contracts, using a sample of 46,453 loans made by 278 large commercial banks around 39 countries, to borrowers in 83 countries, in the period from 1998 to 2006. Our findings indicate that the stringency of capital regulations have an inverse U-shaped relationship with priced risk characteristics (spread and maturity) of loan contracts. In addition, more powerful official supervision is associated with riskier loan contracts. Both official supervisory power and private monitoring work as substitutes to capital regulation to reduce the (priced) risk measures of loan contracts when capital stringency is low. For higher capital stringency, supervision and private monitoring complement capital regulation in reducing loan contracts risk measures. Finally, we found that a country’s degrees of legal enforcement and bank industry competition complement capital and private monitoring regulations to improve risk characteristics of loan contracts. The evidence highlights the importance of how bank lending practices are affected by bank regulations and their interactions with themselves and other institutional country factors.The authors wish to thank the financial support of the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnologia from Spain (grant # SEJ2006-09401)