A Text-Based Measure of Relationship Lending: Evidence from Chinese Listed Banks in the Digital Era

This paper develops a disclosure-based, text-derived measure of banks’ relationship-lending (RL) orientation using annual reports of 58 Chinese listed banks from 2005 to 2023. Based on narratives about long-term customer relationships, soft information, and on-site due diligence, the measure provides a transparent and replicable bank-year proxy for RL emphasis in reporting. The resulting RL indices are robust to alternative aggregation schemes. We document the evolution of RL-related disclosure in the digital era and compare it with the digital transformation (DT) index. We find that the annual averages of RL and DT move upward together over time, although the co-movement differs markedly across bank types. These descriptive patterns highlight how relationship-lending orientation coexists with rapid digital transformation in a major emerging banking system.