Bank Consolidation and Small Business Lending within Local Markets

This paper uses the relatively new CRA small business loan data to examine how bank consolidation has been related to small business lending within a bank's local community - particularly to borrowers having more modest economic prospects, such as very small businesses or those located in low- and moderate-income areas. The results of multivariate tests indicate that during the late 1990s, banks experiencing merger activity- including banks that did not themselves merge but were part of active holding companies - had systematically lower small business loan growth than inactive banks. But, the effects appear to reflect a general decline in small business lending rather than a shift away from lending to lower- income areas or to very small businesses. At the local level, merger-related effects are more pronounced when the merger activity increases the local market share of the surviving bank or its parent holding company. Thus, our results indicate that, at least in terms of the quantity of credit, the effects of bank consolidation do not appear to fall disproportionately on the businesses having more modest prospects. On the other hand, the market-level analysis indicates that standard antitrust concerns about the provision of local banking services still seem to apply in small business credit markets