We document that finance companies and FinTech lenders increased lending to small businesses after the 2008 financial crisis. We show that most of the increase substituted for a reduction in bank lending. In counties in which banks had a larger market share before the crisis, finance companies and FinTech lenders increased their lending more. We find no effect of reduced bank lending on employment, wages, and new business creation by 2016. Our results suggest that finance companies and FinTech lenders are major suppliers of credit to small businesses and played an important role in the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online

We study the contribution of banks and nonbanks to cyclical fluctuations in the supply of syndicated loans. We find that a reduction in nonbank lending explains most of the contraction in syndicated credit and the associated employment losses during the Global Financial Crisis, while banks’ contribution is small. Looking over multiple cycles, we find nonbanks’ credit supply is roughly three times as cyclical as banks’, suggesting that nonbanks are the main drivers of syndicated lending cycles. A model in which government support stabilizes bank funding can explain the higher cyclicality of nonbanks.