This paper provides evidence that the recent housing bust in the United States precipitated a “credit crunch” for small businesses. We compare banks' small business lending in the same metropolitan areas, and find that those that originated or purchased more of their mortgage loans in...

In geographically segmented credit markets, local real estate booms can deteriorate the funding conditions for small manufacturing firms and undermine their competitiveness. Using exogenous variation in the administrative land supply across 172 Chinese cities, we show that higher predicted real...