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The work conducted by Lawrence G. Goldberg and Lawrence G. White does not only provide a significant overview on the importance of banks to small business lending, but offer substantial insights on major policy issues, as well. If the assumption that bank age is inversely related to lending capacity, therefore government officials must be discouraged from prohibiting the formation of new banks since small businesses would be deprived of financial resources. Results further imply that further consolidation would eventually decrease the lending capacity of banks.

Allen and Rai's (1996) paper on operational efficiency in banking arrive at two main conclusions which state that the occurrence of input x-inefficiencies are more significant than the existence of output inefficiencies. However, their conclusions which state that the distribution-free (DF) model overestimates the extent of x-inefficiencies when compared to the stochastic cost frontier (SCF) method are erroneous. Comparison of both the DF and the SCF methods using rank order correlation can better assess the two approaches as tests of relative bank efficiency.

Empirical evidence indicates that lending to small businesses is negatively correlated with the age and size of banks. This observation can be gleaned from a sample of banks with less than $500 million in assets for the period 1993-1996 and which were 25 years or younger at the time. In addition, small business lending is positively correlated with higher concentration rates in urban areas but negatively correlated with higher concentration in rural areas. These empirical findings suggest that bank consolidation has significant effects on small business lending.