Abstract We estimate the impact of a poor bank examination rating on the growth rates of individual bank loan portfolios. We use a novel approach to control for loan demand variation and estimate a fixed-effect model using an unbalanced panel with over 381,000 bank-quarter observations from the period 1994–2011. Our estimates show that a poor examination rating has a large negative impact on bank loan growth, even after controlling for the impact of monetary policy, bank capital and liquidity conditions, and any voluntary reduction in lending triggered by weak legacy loan portfolio performance or other bank losses. This previously unidentified effect is consistent with the hypothesis that the bank supervision process successfully constrains the lending activities of banks operating in an unsafe and unsound manner.