Working Paper

No News is Bad News: Monitoring, Risk, and Stale Financial Performance in Commercial Real Estate

Abstract: As financial intermediaries, banks have a key role in producing information and managing the risks on diverse loan portfolios. An important input into this process is ongoing collection of financial performance from borrowers. Using supervisory data on commercial real estate loans (CRE), this paper studies relationships between the content and timeliness of borrower-reported performance, internal bank risk ratings, and subsequent loan performance. Banks heavily rely on borrower reporting when setting risk ratings, despite the fact that borrowers with stale financials are more likely to default. Although banks can generally be slow to update their ratings as information becomes more stale on average, we find causal evidence that they do monitor more intensively in response to loan, location and portfolio risks.

JEL Classification: G14; G21; G32; R33;

https://doi.org/10.17016/FEDS.2025.032

Bibliographic Information

Provider: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.)

Part of Series: Finance and Economics Discussion Series

Publication Date: 2025-04-23

Number: 2025-032