 Do small businesses still prefer community banks?Allen N. Berger, William Goulding and Tara Rice Journal of Banking & Finance, 2014, vol. 44, issue C, 264-278 Abstract: We formulate and test hypotheses about the role of bank type – small versus large, single-market versus multimarket, and local versus nonlocal banks – in banking relationships. The conventional paradigm suggests that “community banks” – small, single-market, local institutions – are better able to form strong relationships with informationally opaque small businesses, while “megabanks” – large, multimarket, nonlocal institutions – tend to serve more transparent firms. Using the 2003 Survey of Small Business Finance (SSBF), we conduct two sets of tests. First, we test for the type of bank serving as the “main” relationship bank for small businesses with different firm and owner characteristics. Second, we test for the strength of these main relationships by examining the probability of an exclusive relationship and main bank relationship length as functions of main bank type and financial fragility, as well as firm and owner characteristics. The results are often not consistent with the conventional paradigm, perhaps because of changes in lending technologies and deregulation of the banking industry. Keywords: Banks; Relationships; Small business; Government policy (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:eee:jbfina:v:44:y:2014:i:c:p:264-278 DOI: 10.1016/j.jbankfin.2014.03.016 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Banking & Finance is currently edited by Ike Mathur More articles in Journal of Banking & Finance from Elsevier |
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