Screening, Bidding, and the Loan Market Tightness

Melanie Cao () and Shouyong Shi ()

No 80, Cahiers de recherche CREFE / CREFE Working Papers from CREFE, Université du Québec à Montréal

Abstract: Bank loans are more available and cheaper for new and small businesses in the U.S. in areas with highly concentrated banks than in areas with highly competitive banks. To explain this fact, we analyze banks' decisions to screen the project and their subsequent competition in loan provisions. It is shown that, by increasing a negative informational externality to an informed winner, an increase in the number of banks in the market can reduce banks' screening probability sufficiently, reduce the number of banks that actively compete in loan provisions and increase the expected loan rate. This occurs when the screening cost is not very high, in which case all active bidders are informed. The opposite outcome occurs when the screening cost is high, in which case there are sufficiently many uninformed banks in bidding to attenuate the negative informational externality.

Les crédits sont plus facilement disponibles et meilleur marché pour les nouvelles et petites entreprises américaines dans les zone à haute concentration bancaire que dans les zones à forte concurrence bancaire. Pour expliquer ce fait, nous analysons les décisions de sélection de projet par les banques et leur concurrence dans le financement de projets. Nous montrons qu'en augmentant l'externalité informationnelle négative d'un gagnant informé, une augmentation du nombre de banques dans le marché peut réduire suffisamment la probabilité de sélection, réduire le nombre de banques qui sont activement en concurrence pour les crédits et augmenter le taux d'emprunt attendu. Ceci a lieu lorsque le coût de sélection est élevé, auquel cas il y a un nombre suffisant de banques non-informées qui soumissionnent pour que cela atténue l'externalité informationnelle négative.

Keywords: screening; bidding; loans; information externality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G21 D44 L15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-mic and nep-pke
Date: 1999-02
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Related works:
Working Paper: Screening, Bidding, and the Loan Market Tightness (1999)
Working Paper: Screening, Bidding, and the Loan Market Tightness (2000)
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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cre:crefwp:80

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