The Effects of Bank Mergers on Small Business Lending in Germany

Thomas Bloch

No 193, Working Paper Series: Finance and Accounting from Department of Finance, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main

Abstract: In this paper, we examine the impact of mergers among German savings banks on the extent to which these savings banks engage in small business lending. The ongoing consolidation in the banking industry has sparked concerns about the continuous availability of credit to small businesses which has been further fueled by empirical studies that partly confirm a reduction in small business lending in the aftermath of mergers. However, using a proprietary data set of German savings banks we find strong evidence that in Germany merging savings banks do not significantly change the extent to which they lend to small businesses compared to prior to the merger or compared to the contemporaneous lending by non-merging banks. We investigate the merger related effects on small business lending in Germany from a bank-level perspective. Furthermore, we estimate small business lending and its continuous adjustment process simultaneously using recent General Method of Moments (GMM) techniques for panel data as proposed by Arellano and Bond (1991).

JEL-codes: C23 G21 G28 G34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-bec, nep-cfn and nep-com
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.finance.uni-frankfurt.de/wp/1703.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

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:fra:franaf:193

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series: Finance and Accounting from Department of Finance, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main Senckenberganlage 31, 60054 Frankfurt. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Reinhard H. Schmidt ().