We study the effect of financial distress in foreign parent banks on local SME financing in 14 central and eastern European countries during the early stages of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. We use survey data on applicant and non-applicant firms that enable us to disentangle effects driven by...

"We review how deregulation, technological advance, and increased competitive rivalry have affected the size and health of the U.S. community banking sector and the quality and availability of banking products and services. We then develop a simple theoretical framework for analyzing how these...

The literature has documented a positive relationship between the use of credit scoring for small business loans and small business credit availability, broadly defined. However, this literature is hampered by the fact that all of the studies are based on a single 1998 survey of the very largest...

Economic agents pursue government funds using political connections, but it is sometimes unclear which types of connections and whose connections matter, and which agents have opportunities to benefit. We address these issues for the over one-half-trillion-dollar Paycheck Protection Program...

Mounting evidence indicates that firms, particularly SMEs, suffered from a significant credit crunch during this crisis. Little research exists on how SMEs coped with this problem due to a lack of data in the U.S. and elsewhere. We analyse for the first time whether trade credit provided an...

Conventional wisdom holds that small banks have comparative advantages vis-à-vis large banks in serving small firms, while recent literature suggests this may not be the case. Using a panel of recent US start-ups, we investigate how small bank presence affects these firms in normal times...