In a seminal article on small business lending, Petersen & Rajan (2002) argue that technological changes have revolutionized small business lending markets, weakening the reliance of small businesses on local lenders and increasing geographic distances between firms and their credit suppliers....

Using a proprietary dataset of credit bureau records, Cohen-Cole (2008) finds that banks set credit limits on revolving accounts based in part on the racial composition of the neighborhood in which each borrower resides. This paper evaluates the evidence presented in that working paper using the...

Little empirical work exists on the substitutability of depository institutions. In particular, the willingness of consumers to substitute banks for thrifts and to switch between multimarket and single-market institutions (i.e., institutions with large vs. small branch networks) has been of...

In a seminal article on small business lending, Petersen & Rajan (2002) argue that technological changes have revolutionized small business lending markets, weakening the reliance of small businesses on local lenders and increasing geographic distances between firms and their credit suppliers....

Under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) banks can fulfill their affirmative obligation to meet local credit needs by lending in low-to-moderate-income (LMI) communities or by purchasing loans made by others. This paper evaluates whether giving CRA credit for purchases has had its intended...

This paper examines the relationship between multimarket bank presence and the profitability (and therefore viability) of small, single-market banks. We find that increased presence of multimarket banks is associated with a significant reduction in the profitability of small, single-market banks...

This paper uses a large sample of individual banking organizations, observed from 1996 to 2003, to investigate the characteristics that made them more likely to be acquired. We use a definition of acquisition that we consider preferable to that used in much of the previous literature, and we...

It is frequently claimed that high ATM surcharges actually attract customers to the banks that impose them, particularly if they operate large ATM networks. By exploiting as natural experiments two events associated with the lifting of surcharge bans in Iowa and in the states that neighbor Iowa,...

This paper investigates depository institutions' decisions whether or not to impose surcharges (direct usage fees) on non-depositors who use their ATMs. In addition to documenting patterns of surcharging, we examine motives for surcharging, including both direct generation of fee revenue and the...

The literature on network industries and network effects notes that incompatibility across rival systems can influence firms' incentives to invest in product changes that are beneficial to the consumer. We investigate this phenomenon in the case of bank ATM networks, where the number of ATM...