Loan officers and relationship lending to SMEs

Hirofumi Uchida, Gregory F. Udell and Nobuyoshi Yamori ()

No 2008-17, Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

Abstract: Previous research suggests that loan officers play a critical role in relationship lending by producing soft information about SMEs. For the first time, we empirically confirm this hypothesis We also examine whether the role of loan officers differs from small to large banks as predicted by Stein (2002). While we find that small banks produce more soft information, the capacity and manner in which loan officers produce soft information does not seem to differ between large and small banks. This suggests that, although large banks may produce more soft information, they likely tend to concentrate their resources on transactions lending.

Keywords: Banks and banking; Bank loans; Commercial credit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban
Date: Written 2008
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/papers/2008/wp08-17bk.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.frbsf.org/popups/fiporder.html

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Diane Rosenberger ().