Our paper studies the existence of political rents in bank lending in Mexico. Unlike prior studies examining political rent seeking in public sector banks, we focus on an economy with a fully privatized banking sector where the existence of political rent seeking is not obvious.
The data that we use corresponds to the universe of commercial bank loans in Mexico from 2003 to 2012. We classify firms as politically connected if they are located in a state that elected a senator who at a particular time chaired an important senate committee. 1 We then narrow down our definition of political connection by focusing on firms that, in addition to being headquartered in the same state, operate in an industry related to the purview of the chairman’s commission, or are located in the same municipality in which the chairman lives. Having this classification of political connection allows us to exploit within-firm variation over time, and compare a firm’s loan terms and performance when it is politically connected and when it is not.