Business Commons^™

State Ownership And Banks Information Rents: Evidence From China, Fengyan Ru, Qi Liang, Wei Wang

Business Faculty Publications

In a lending relationship, a bank with an information advantage regarding its client tends to hold up the borrower and charge higher interest rates. We conjecture that state-owned enterprises (SOEs), with worse information asymmetry, are subject to greater information
rents. State-owned banks place less emphasis on information production and hence extract lower rents compared to profit maximizing private banks. We use the decline of loan interest rates around the borrowers’ equity initial public offerings (IPOs) as the proxy of banks’ information rents. We find SOEs in China experience
larger declines in loan interest rates around their IPOs; the central government-controlled …