Effects of Monetary Incentives and Career Concerns on Quality of Bank Loans: Evidence from Branch Credit Committee of an Iranian Commercial Bank

According to the financial literature, the agency problem can affect bank loans when there is information asymmetry. In this regard, the contract between the bank and bank agents, who are involved in the lending process, is considered crucial along with monetary incentives. Career concerns and characteristics of bank agents can also affect these agents' performance, and effectiveness of the bank’s monetary incentives. Based on the results of empirical and theoretical studies, the performance-based incentives or rewards (as opposed to lending-based incentives) and more career concerns of bank’s agents leads to an increase in the quality of lending, albeit by reducing risk-taking leads to reduction in the lending measure (profitability) of the bank. This paper analyzes the effects of monetary incentives and career concerns on micro-loans quality. The effects of monetary incentives were analyzed by studying how the members of the branch credit committee of an Iranian commercial bank were compensated by the bank. In fact, this bank changed from a volume-based compensation system into a compensation system based on both “lending volume” and “performance”. The paper also analyzes the impacts of career concerns on loan quality by considering the characteristics of branch credit committee’s members. Since, on the one hand, the dependent variable (loan quality) is a discrete ordinal variable and on the other hand, based on the Brant test᾿s result the proportional odds assumption was violated, the generalized ordinal logit model was used. The results indicated that “performance-based incentives” improved micro-lending quality. The results also showed that branch credit committees with more women and youth people had higher micro-lending quality.