On-Site Inspecting Zombie Lending
研究了葡萄牙银行现场检查如何影响其未来贷款决策，发现被检查银行对僵尸企业再融资的可能性降低20%，促使这些企业立即违约。
“Zombie lending” remains a widespread practice by banks around the world. In this paper, we exploit a series of large-scale on-site inspections made on the credit portfolios of several Portuguese banks to investigate how these inspections affect banks’ future lending decisions. We find that an inspected bank becomes 20% less likely to refinance zombie firms, immediately spurring their default. Overall, banks seemingly reduce zombie lending because the incentives to hold these loans disappear once they are forced to recognize losses. This paper was accepted by Tomasz Piskorski, finance. Funding: D. Bonfim and G. Cerqueiro acknowledge financial support from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [Grants PTDC/EGE-OGE/30314/2017 and UID/GES/00407/2013]. H. Degryse acknowledges financial support from Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek. S. Ongena acknowledges financial support from the Horizon 2020 European Research Council [Grant ERC ADG 2016 - GA 740272 lending]. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4452 .