Relationship lending and the transmission of monetary policy

Repeated interactions allow lenders to uncover private information about their clients, decreasing the informational asymmetry between a borrower and his lender but introducing one between the lender and competing financiers. This paper constructs a credit-based model of production to analyze how learning through lending relationships affects monetary transmission. I examine how monetary policy changes the incentives of borrowers and lenders to engage in relationship lending and how these changes then shape the response of aggregate output. The results demonstrate that relationship lending prevails in equilibrium, smoothes the steady state output profile, and induces less volatile responses to certain monetary shocks. ► A model is built to analyze the macroeconomic implications of relationship lending. ► Such relationships prevail in equilibrium and dampen monetary transmission. ► Policy-invariant loan rates are observed for some second-time borrowers. ► Tempered loan rates are observed for new borrowers.