Digitalization and Credit Markets: Evidence from eInvoicing

We document the effects of electronic invoicing (eInvoicing) on credit markets. By making invoices more standardized, verifiable, and harder to falsify, eInvoicing changes lenders’ information sets, facilitating invoice-based financing and credit risk assessment. We exploit a regional eInvoicing mandate and administrative credit data using a difference-in-differences design to provide three main insights. First, credit reallocates toward firms already relying on invoice-based credit (“invoice firms†) and away from non-invoice firms. Second, the cost of (non-)invoice credit falls (rises) for (non-)invoice firms, consistent with a supply-driven mechanism. Third, banks’ information production changes: eInvoicing widens (reduces) the dispersion of rates and banks’ risk assessments and improves (worsens) their predictive accuracy for (non-)invoice firms. Overall, eInvoicing reshapes credit market outcomes, with uneven effects across borrowers.