Social Connectedness in Bank Lending

Oliver Rehbein and Simon Rother

The Review of Financial Studies, 2025, vol. 38, issue 9, 2759-2809

Abstract: We present evidence that loan allocations and loan terms are closely linked to the strength of social connections between bank and borrower regions. Lending increases with social connectedness, particularly in the presence of strong screening incentives. If connectedness is high, banks discriminate between borrowers more, the terms of originated loans are more borrower friendly, and loan performance is better. Furthermore, social connectedness is associated with higher bank profitability and with lending-related increases in borrower-region GDP growth and employment. Our results suggest that lending barriers decrease with social connectedness, which helps our understanding of geographic lending patterns and regional economic disparities.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/rfs/hhaf014 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:rfinst:v:38:y:2025:i:9:p:2759-2809.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Financial Studies is currently edited by Itay Goldstein

More articles in The Review of Financial Studies from Society for Financial Studies Oxford University Press, Journals Department, 2001 Evans Road, Cary, NC 27513 USA.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().