The banking industry has undergone substantial consolidation during the last 15 years, and that process has accelerated in the 1990s. One effect of this consolidation has been to greatly reduce the number of independent and locally owned banks. Some banks have been acquired by distant banking...

We examine the informational effects of M&As by investigating whether bank mergers improve banks’ abilities to screen their borrowers. By exploiting a dataset in which we observe a measure of a borrower’s default risk which the lenders observe only imperfectly, we find evidence of these...

There is growing evidence showing that large and small banks differ in how they service retail customers. Large, multi-market banks (LMBs) have more standardized operations and set interest rates that are uniform across local markets, while small banks have greater autonomy to set rates...