We test a new hypothesis that may help explain the procyclicality of bank lending. The institutional memory hypothesis is driven by deterioration in the ability of loan officers over the bank's lending cycle that results in an easing of credit standards. We test this hypothesis using data from individual US banks over 1980–2000: over 200,000 bank-level observations on commercial loan growth, over 2,000,000 loan-level observations on interest rate premiums, and over 2000 bank-level observations on credit standards and loan spreads from bank management survey responses. The empirical analysis supports the hypothesis, although there are differences by bank size class.

We study the effects of the interplay between deregulation and governance on risk-taking in the financial industry. We consider the removal of regulatory geographic constraints for savings banks in Spain, the cajas, which led to a nationwide expansion of these banks during the past two decades. Based on a unique dataset that combines information on the geographic distribution of bank lending, matched lender-borrower financial statements, and borrower defaults, we find that the governance of the savings banks significantly affects the way in which they expand their lending activities. Savings banks that are subject to political influence by regional governments exhibit higher ex ante risk-taking and higher ex post loan defaults. Our study highlights the broader implications of the impact of global deregulation and consolidation and their interaction with governance issues.

This article examines the economics of financing small business in private equity and debt markets. Firms are viewed through a financial growth cycle paradigm in which different capital structures are optimal at different points in the cycle. We show the sources of small business finance, and how capital structure varies with firm size and age. The interconnectedness of small firm finance is discussed along with the impact of the macroeconomic environment. We also analyze a number of research and policy issues, review the literature, and suggest topics for future research.

Some studies find that market power is associated with credit availability (information hypothesis); others find that less competitive banking markets lead to more credit rationing (market power hypothesis). Empirical research has relied solely on concentration as a measure of market power. The industrial organization literature, however, argues that a structural competition indicator such as the Lerner index is a superior measure. We test the information hypothesis and the market power hypothesis using these two alternative measures of market power and find that they generally give conflicting results. However, we also offer evidence suggesting that both views can be reconciled.

This paper investigates whether the benefits of bank–borrower relationships differ depending on three factors identified in the theoretical literature: verifiability of information, bank size and complexity, and bank competition. We extend the current literature by analyzing how relationship lending affects loan contract terms and credit availability in an empirical model that simultaneously accounts for all three of these factors. Based on Japanese survey data we find evidence that the benefits from stronger bank–borrower relationships in terms of credit availability are limited to smaller banks. However, when the benefits are measured as improved credit terms, we find little additional benefit, and in some cases increased cost, from stronger relationships for opaque borrowers and for borrowers who get funding from small banks. These latter findings suggest the possibility that relationship borrowers may suffer from capture effects.

Market size structure refers to the distribution of shares of different size classes of local market participants, where the sizes are inclusive of assets both within and outside the local market. We apply this new measure of market structure in two empirical analyses of the US banking industry to address concerns regarding the effects of the consolidation in banking. Our quantity analysis of the likelihood that small businesses borrow from large versus small banks and our small business loan price analysis that includes market size structure as well as conventional measures yield very different findings from most of the literature on bank size and small business lending. Our results do not suggest a significant net advantage or disadvantage for large banks in small business lending overall, or in lending to informationally opaque small businesses in particular. We argue that the prior research that excluded market size structure may be misleading and offer some likely explanations of why our results differ.

A popular explanation for the explosive growth in banks' off-balance sheet (OBS) activities is the avoidance of capital adequacy requirements. Several studies have examined this and other motivations behind bank OBS activities with mixed results. We shed further light on the issue of OBS growth by modelling OBS products as financial innovations subject to a logistic diffusion adoption pattern. Our data also allows us to investigate the impact of important changes in capital adequacy regulations on OBS diffusion rates. We find that changes in capital requirements have had no consistent impact on the speed of diffusion across OBS activities.

We examine the effects of bank M&As on small business lending using data on over 6000 recent U.S. bank M&As. We are the first to decompose the impact of M&As into the static effects from simply melding the antecedent institutions and the dynamic effects associated with post-M&A refocusing of the consolidated institution. We are also the first to estimate the dynamic reactions of other local banks. We find that the static effects of consolidation reduce small business lending, but are mostly offset by the reactions of other banks, and in some cases also by refocusing efforts of the consolidating institutions themselves.

Using unique micro data compiled from the real estate registry in Japan, we examine more than 400,000 loan-to-value (LTV) business loan ratios to draw implications for caps on LTV ratios as a macroprudential policy measure. We find that the LTV ratio exhibits counter-cyclicality, behavior that would have severely impeded the efficacy of a simple LTV cap had it been imposed. We also find that borrowers obtaining high-LTV loans are more risky but grew faster than those with lower LTV loans, which implies that a simple fixed cap on LTV ratios might inhibit growing (albeit risky) firms from borrowing.

We test hypotheses about the effects of bank size, foreign ownership, and distress on lending to informationally opaque small firms using a rich new data set on Argentinean banks, firms, and loans. We also test hypotheses about borrowing from a single bank versus multiple banks. Our results suggest that large and foreign-owned institutions may have difficulty extending relationship loans to opaque small firms. Bank distress appears to have no greater effect on small borrowers than on large borrowers, although even small firms may react to bank distress by borrowing from multiple banks, raising borrowing costs and destroying some relationship benefits.