Information Span and Credit Market Competition

This paper was previously circulated under the title “Specialized Lending when Big Data Hardens Soft Information.” For helpful comments, we thank Philip Bond, Christa Bouwman, Bruce Carlin, Peter DeMarzo, Itay Goldstein, Veronica Guerrieri, Christopher Hrdlicka, Lewis Kornhauser, Dan Luo, Michael Ostrovsky, Andy Skrzypacz, Savitar Sundaresan, Laura Veldkamp, Zhe Wang, Basil Williams, Liyan Yang, Jidong Zhou, and participants at Yale Junior Finance Conference, Texas A&M University, Texas Finance Festival, Tsinghua PBC, Lone Star Finance Conference, WAPFIN at Stern, NYU Stern, BIS-CEPR-SCG-SFI Financial Intermediation Workshop, FTG, Frankfurt School, Goethe University, Indiana University, Rice University, Northeastern, Stanford GSB FRILLs, Yale SOM, UBC Winter Conference, UCL, Women in Macroeconomics Conference, INSEAD Finance Symposium, University of Washington, Annual Paul Woolley Centre Conference at LSE, Oxford Financial Intermediation Theory Conference, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Duke Fuqua, MIT Sloan, and 2024 Fall NBER Corporate Finance Meeting (Stanford). Ningxin Zhang and Jialu Rao provided excellent research assistance. He acknowledges financial support from the John E. Jeuck Endowment at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business as part of the paper was written when He worked at University of Chicago. All errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.