Do Mergers Improve Information? Evidence from the Loan Market
利用贷款数据，发现银行并购后能更准确地将利率与借款人的违约风险匹配，风险高的借款人利率上升、风险低的下降，这种信息改善源于合并后银行更有效地处理“硬”信息，而非直接共享客户信息。
We examine the informational effects of M&As by investigating whether bank mergers improve banks' ability to screen borrowers. By exploiting a data set in which we observe a measure of a borrower's default risk that the lenders observe only imperfectly, we find evidence of these informational improvements. Mergers lead to a closer correspondence between interest rates and individual default risk: after a merger, risky borrowers experience an increase in the interest rate, while nonrisky borrowers enjoy lower interest rates. These informational benefits appear to derive from improvements in information processing resulting from the merger, rather than from explicit information sharing on individual customers among the merging parties. Our evidence suggests that part of these informational improvements stem from the consolidated banks using “hard” information more intensively.