We study the political economy of allocation decisions within a major state investment bank. Our focus is the European Investment Bank (EIB) – “The Bank of the EU” – which is the largest multilateral lending (and borrowing) institution in the world. We study the behavior of about 500 national representatives at the EIB’s Board of Directors – the bank’s decisive body for loan approvals – and show that a representative’s appointment increases the probability that the sub-national region where she works receives a loan by about 17 percentage points. This “home-bias” effect is driven by large loans financing infrastructure projects. We discuss several pieces of evidence, which are consistent with the hypothesis that this home-bias lending may be due to favoritism, however, we cannot conclusively demonstrate this case of resource misallocation.

中文翻译：

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向欧洲地区提供多边贷款的政治经济学

我们研究大型国有投资银行内部分配决策的政治经济学。我们的重点是欧洲投资银行（EIB）–“欧盟银行” –这是世界上最大的多边贷款（和借款）机构。我们研究了EIB董事会（银行批准贷款的决定性机构）中约500名国家代表的行为，并表明任命代表可以使她所在的国家以下地区获得贷款的可能性提高约17个百分点。这种“居家偏见”效应是由大型贷款为基础设施项目融资所驱动。我们讨论了几项证据，这与这种偏见性贷款可能是由于偏爱造成的假设是一致的，但是，我们无法最终证明这种资源配置不当的情况。