Bank relationships and small-business closures during the Finnish recession of the 1990s

Helvi Kinnunen and Vesa Vihriälä

No 13/1999, Bank of Finland Research Discussion Papers from Bank of Finland

Abstract: The paper examines the role of bank relationships in business closures during the Finnish economic crisis of the early 1990s.We utilise a unique panel data set of 474 small and medium-sized firms, for which we have standard accounting information and for which we can in addition identify whether the firm had a lending relationship with the most troubled part of the banking system, namely the Savings Bank of Finland and Skopbank.By estimating a logit model we find that, even accounting for the effects of liquidity, profitability, indebtedness, age and size, firms that had a lending relationship with the savings banks concerned were more likely to close in 1992 than other firms that year or the same firms in other years.Thus being a loan customer of these banks entailed greater risk for firms than having a lending relationship with other intermediaries only in 1992, which was the year the banking sector came to a head.The result lends support to the hypothesis that financial factors affect real outcomes not only through firm and household balance sheets but also through bank behaviour.

Date: 1999
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/211844/1/bof-rdp1999-013.pdf (application/pdf)

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

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:bofrdp:rdp1999_013

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Bank of Finland Research Discussion Papers from Bank of Finland Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().