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Academic research recognizes that the organizational structure of banks could have implications for the financing of small businesses and entrepreneurial firms. In this chapter, we start by reviewing the underlying theoretical motivation and then summarize existing evidence. Overall, it is confirmed that the organization of lending institutions is important for the use and transmission of information, as well as credit availability for small businesses. Moreover, using a unique dataset of bank loans, we empirically document that loan contract characteristics such as interest rates and collateral requirements are sensitive to the hierarchical allocation of decision-making authority within the bank’s organization. JEL Classification

This paper examines how the cost of bank debt reflects public information about borrower quality, and whether such information complements or substitutes the private information of banks. Using a sample of small business loans, and the award of a competitive public subsidy as an observable positive signal of external certification, we find that certification is associated with a lower cost of debt for subsidy recipients if the amount of private information of the lender is limited or the local credit market is less competitive. Public information loses importance once the bank accumulates information over the course of the lending relationship or the credit market is more competitive. Our results highlight a positive effect of external certification, driven by the signal it provides to both the lending bank and its competitors, and suggest that public and private information can be substitutes in the pricing of bank debt.

We examine management innovation of family and non-family firms after CEO successions by using data of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Japan. Consistent with predictions based on the resource-based view and agency theory, we find that family firms managed by non-family professional CEO successors are less innovative than those managed by family CEO successors or non-family firms. Further analyses indicate that limited access to family-based resources is a key determinant of the conservativeness of professional CEO successors. Our findings suggest the importance of the congruence of ownership and management in family firms due to CEOs’ access to family-based resources.

Using firm-level survey information, we investigate whether relationship lending affects firms’ employment decisions in the face of negative sales shock. We find that firms with a durable relationship with their main bank display significantly less employment growth sensitivity to such shocks, especially where these are transitory. The result is stronger for younger and smaller firms that benefit from tighter bank-firm relationships, and for firms in sectors or economic environments where the costs of employment adjustment are greater. Our findings indicate that relationship lending provides liquidity insurance to firms to meet their demand for labor hoarding.

This paper uses a variety of estimation methods to explore the empirical relationship between interest rate and collateral requirements in bank loan contracts. Methods that do not allow for endogenous contract terms detect a positive reciprocal association between interest rate and collateral. Methods that allow for endogenous contract terms point to a strong positive effect of interest rate on collateral but the effect of collateral on interest rate is weaker. This highlights the importance of incorporating the endogenous nature of contract terms in empirical work.

By using mid-corporate loan-level data on loan approval decisions collected from a large European bank, we investigate whether spatially-based bank organizational frictions affect borrowers’ credit availability.

This paper examines how collateralization in small business lending varies with bank-borrower proximity. Our analysis establishes a robust inverse relationship between distance and collateral: Borrowers located in the vicinity of the bank face higher collateral requirements. The estimated relationship is independent of the allocation of decision-making authority within the lending organization, competitive pressure in the local credit markets, or risk rating of the borrower. Our findings seem consistent with the notion that distance reflects transaction costs associated with the assessment, inspection, and possible repossession of collateral.

In this paper we study the relevance of the gender of the contracting parties involved in lending. We show that female entrepreneurs face tighter credit availability, even though they do not pay higher interest rates. The effect is independent of the information available about the borrower and holds if we control for unobservable individual effects. The gender of the loan officer is also important: we find that female officers are more risk-averse or less self-confident than male officers as they tend to restrict credit availability to new, un-established borrowers more than their male counterparts.

A growing body of research focuses on banking organizational issues, emphasizing the culties encountered by hierarchically organized banks in lending to borrowers/projects with high intensity of soft information. However, as the two extreme cases of hierarchical and non-hierarchical organizations are typically contrasted, what actually shapes the degree of hierarchy and how to measure it remain fairly vague. In this paper we compare bank size and distance between bank's branches and headquarter as possible sources of organizational frictions. In particular, we study the impact of distance and bank size on the firms' likelihood of introducing innovations and financing constraints on a sample of Italian SMEs. Our results show that firms located in provinces where the local banking system is functionally distant are less inclined to introduce innovations and are more likely to be credit rationed. Conversely, we find that the market share of large banks is only rarely statistically significant and when it is, the economic impact on the probability of introducing innovation and credit rationing is appreciably smaller than that of functional distance. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

We present a simple theory and an empirical test for state dependence in firm access to credit. We estimate a first-order Markov model of credit restriction with sample selection that makes it possible to estimate state dependence in the presence of feedback effects and observed and unobserved heterogeneity. The results, based on a representative sample of Italian firms, show that state dependence in access to credit is a statistical and economically significant: experiencing a credit restriction in the past has a negative impact on the outcome of the current loan application and the decision to apply for a new loan.

The intimate linkages between law and finance are currently the centre of wide-ranging empirical investigations. This article presents a simple banking model with information asymmetries concerning borrowers’ entrepreneurial talent. It is shown that improvements in the enforcement of contract by courts reduce agency problems but can also reduce the bank’s incentive to screen borrowers adequately, thus worsening credit allocation. A stricter enforcement of credit contracts, therefore, may be socially harmful even if costlessly achieved. Improvements in accounting standards, however, always make bank screening of borrowers less costly and improve credit allocation and social welfare.

This paper investigates the effects of property taxation on fiscal discipline for a sample of OECD countries over the period 1973–2011. We find that aggregate property taxation in total tax revenues is not statistically correlated with the primary surplus-to-GDP ratio. In contrast, a greater reliance on property taxes pertaining to sub-national governments contributes to fiscal discipline, suggesting that fiscal decentralization should favor responsive tax base instruments.

In this paper we explore the effects of bank–borrower physical proximity on price and non-price aspects of small business lending in local credit markets. Along the price dimension, our analysis reveals that interest rates increase with bank–borrower distance and decrease with the distance between borrower and other competing banks. Along the quantity dimension, we observe that more distant borrowers are more likely to experience binding credit limits. We also show that the quantity effects of bank–borrower distance are concentrated among less transparent firms. Our findings are consistent with pricing based on marginal costs that reflect information-based factors, and are in contrast to the established paradigm, where banks adopt spatial discriminatory pricing rules when lending to small-sized enterprises.

In many countries, Mutual Loan-Guarantee Societies (MLGSs) are assuming ever-increasing importance for small business lending. In this paper we provide a theory to rationalise the raison d'^etre of MLGSs. The basic intuition is that the foundation for MLGSs lies in the inefficiencies created by adverse selection, when borrowers do not have enough collateralisable wealth to satisfy collateral requirements and induce self-selecting contracts. In this setting, we view MLGSs as a wealth-pooling mechanism that allows otherwise inefficiently rationed borrowers to obtain credit. We focus on the case of large, complex urban economies where potential entrepreneurs are numerous and possess no more information about each other than do banks. Despite our extreme assumption on information availability, we show that MLGSs can be characterized by assortative matching in which only safe borrowers have an incentive to join the mutual society.

We estimate a behavioural model of household’s remittances to investigate to what extent the level of financial development in the home country affects decisions on whether and how much to remit.

In this chapter we review the academic literature on the role of loan officers in the loan origination process and lending relationships with small businesses. In particular, we focus on a recent stream of research which recognizes that loan officers – with their behavior, character and even emotions – are a key factor affecting the outcome of bank-firm relationships.

Recent empirical findings by Elsas (2005) and Degryse and Ongena (2007) document a U-shaped effect of market concentration on relationship lending whichvcannot be easily accommodated to the investment and strategic theory of relationship lending. In this paper, we show that this non-monotonicity can be explained by looking at the organisational structure of local credit markets. We provide evidence that marginal increases in interbank competition are detrimental (favourable) to relationship lending in markets where transaction-based loans are a primary (limited) product offered by a vast (tiny) group of large, outside headquartered banks. On the contrary, where relational-based lending technologies are already widely in;use in the market, an increase in competition may drive banks to further cultivate their extensive ties with customers. Finally, we show that when competition comes from functionally distant banks, local intermediaries increase their engagement in relationship lending with local firms, consistent with the flight-to-captivity mechanism introduced by Boot and Thakor (2000) and further discussed by Dell'Ariccia and Marquez (2004) and Hauswald and Marquez (2006).

One of the most lively-debated effects of banking acquisitions is the change in lending and asset allocation of the target bank in favour of transaction-based products, at the expense of small and informationally opaque borrowers. These changes may be the result of two distinct restructuring strategies pursued by the acquirer with respect to the asset portfolio of the acquired bank: a cleaning strategy (CS), in which the acquirer makes a clean sweep of all the negative net present value activities in the portfolio of the acquired bank, and a portfolio strategy (PS), in which the acquiring bank permanently changes the portfolio allocation of the acquired bank. In this paper we focus on Italian bank acquisitions and test which asset restructuring strategy was predominantly pursued over the period 1997–2003. Moreover, we distinguish acquisitions according to their geographic diversifying character and to the physical and cultural distances that separate acquiring from acquired banks. When we look at the mean value, we do not find clear evidence of a primacy either of CSs or PSs. When we separate in-market from out-of-market bank acquisitions, however, results show that the CSs prevail only in the former type of deals, while in the latter the portfolio of acquired banks is subject to PSs. Finally, we find that differences in asset restructuring strategies can be explained by differences in corporate culture and the workplace environment of the dealing partners.

Belonging to a group (i.e. industry, geographic area, ethnic group) of borrowers seems to play a crucial role in determining credit availability and interest rates. In this paper, we give a rationale for this phenomenon, based on incomplete information. Assuming that groups’ quality changes over time and that banks estimate it on the basis of the past observed default rates, a result of persistent group discrimination is derived. If group reputation and high interest rates affect the firms’ real quality by hampering the development of entrepreneurial skills or by inducing good firms to migrate, the initial discrimination may even cause permanent effects on the economy.