Theory suggests that greater hierarchical distance between a subordinate and his boss makes it more difficult to share abstract and subjective information in decision making. A novel data set put together from credit dossiers of large corporate loan applicants enables us to observe the information collected by loan officers and also how it is used by the ultimate loan approving officer. We find that greater hierarchical / geographical distance between the information collecting agent and the loan approving officer leads to less reliance on subjective information and more on objective information. By exploiting non-linearities in the "assignment rules" that determine an applicant's hierarchical distance, and using information collecting agent fixed effects, we show that our result cannot be driven by endogenous assignment of applicants. We also find that higher frequency of interactions between the information collecting agent and loan approving officer, both over time and through geographical proximity, helps mitigate the effects of hierarchical distance on information use. Our results show that hierarchical distance influences information use, and highlights the importance of "human touch" in communication.

We present evidence that reassigning tasks among agents can alleviate moral hazard in communication. A rotation policy that routinely reassigns loan officers to borrowers of a commercial bank affects the officers' reporting behavior. When an officer anticipates rotation, reports are more accurate and contain more bad news about the borrower's repayment prospects. As a result, the rotation policy makes bank lending decisions more sensitive to officer reports. The threat of rotation improves communication because self-reporting bad news has a smaller negative effect on an officer's career prospects than bad news exposed by a successor. Copyright (c) 2010 The American Finance Association.

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This paper provides evidence that lenders to a firm close to distress have incentives to coordinate: lower financing by one lender reduces firm creditworthiness and causes other lenders to reduce financing. To isolate the coordination channel from lenders' joint reaction to new information, we exploit a natural experiment that forced lenders to share negative private assessments about their borrowers. We show that lenders, while learning nothing new about the firm, reduce credit in anticipation of other lenders' reaction to the negative news about the firm. The results show that public information exacerbates lender coordination and increases the incidence of firm financial distress.