Academic research recognizes that the organizational structure of banks could have implications for the financing of small businesses and entrepreneurial firms. In this chapter, we start by reviewing the underlying theoretical motivation and then summarize existing evidence. Overall, it is...

A puzzling but consistent result in the empirical literature on banking is that firms with close bank ties do not grow faster than bank-independent firms. In this paper, we reconsider the link between relationship lending and firms' growth, distinguishing firms by size and "health". The idea is...