Business Analyst Journal

We have analysed the effectiveness of monitoring by banks as a tool of corporate governance and the impact it has on the value of the borrowing firms. We used three indicators as proxies for strong bank monitoring on a company- a) substantial ratio of bank debt to overall debt, b) borrowings from private banks and c) sizeable banking relationships. A dataset comprising Indian non-financial companies from years 2003-2018 was used in our panel-data regression models. We considered a robust sample size of observations, consisting ~2269 firm years from public as well as private organizations. The result outcomes from our study show that all the three measures significantly impact the value of the borrower firm. However, while the share of bank borrowing as well as the type of banker are significant factors that have positive influence on the value, the number of different banking relations has an inverse impact on the same. Borrowing from multiple banks leads to drop infirm value, proving that a single bank relationship is stronger means of corporate governance as it mitigates any "free-rider" problems. This indicates that only the banks with high quality active monitoring play a key governance role, thus improving firm value.