Do Small Businesses Still Prefer Community Banks?

Allen Berger (), William Goulding and Tara N. Rice

No 1096, International Finance Discussion Papers from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.)

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 multiple relationships and 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)
JEL-codes: G21 G28 G34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2013-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-bec, nep-ent and nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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