Using a dataset covering 3 million commercial borrower financial statements, we document a substantial, nearly monotonic decline in banks’ use of attested financial statements (AFS) in lending over the past two decades. Two market forces help explain this trend. First, technological advances provide lenders with access to a growing array of borrower information sources that can substitute for AFS. Second, banks are increasingly competing with nonbank lenders that rely less on AFS in screening and monitoring. Our results illustrate how technology adoption and changes in credit market structure can render AFS less efficient than alternative information sources for screening and monitoring.

中文翻译：

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不需要财务报表


使用涵盖 300 万份商业借款人财务报表的数据集，我们记录了过去二十年中银行在贷款中使用经鉴证财务报表 （AFS） 的大幅、近乎单调的下降。两种市场力量有助于解释这一趋势。首先，技术进步为贷款人提供了越来越多的借款人信息来源，这些来源可以替代 AFS。其次，银行越来越多地与非银行贷款人竞争，这些贷款人在筛选和监控方面不太依赖 AFS。我们的结果表明，技术采用和信贷市场结构的变化如何使 AFS 的效率低于筛选和监测的替代信息来源。