 Banking consolidation and small business lendingNo 407, Working Paper Series from European Central Bank Abstract: The paper investigates small business lending as an information problem. It models the effects of information asymmetries within the bank combined with fixed wages. Two kinds of inefficiencies arise in equilibrium: the credit officer either sometimes shirks or he is occasionally fired. In both cases lending falls below the first-best level. The solution, when the bank accepts the information asymmetries, is called the centralized structure. Under decentralized structure the bank employs additional supervisors to mitigate the information asymmetries within its organization. Decentralized banks manage to finance more small firms, but incur higher costs than centralized ones. Small banks are interpreted as a bank with relatively few credit officers, whom can be monitored without information asymmetries. The specification allows for investigating the effects of banking consolidation and technological change on small business lending. The model suggests that not banking size, but organizational structure is decisive in small business lending. JEL Classification: G21, G34, J30 Keywords: banking; Corporate governance; efficiency wage; small business lending (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecb:ecbwps:2004407 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Paper Series from European Central Bank 60640 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.