We examine the effects of bank M&As on small business lending using data on over 6,000 recent U.S. bank M&As. We are the first to decompose the impact of M&As into static effects from simply melding the antecedent institutions, and dynamic effects associated with post-M&A refocusing of the...

Theoretical and empirical work suggests that commercial loan officers play a critical role in relationship lending by producing soft information about their SME borrowers. We test whether loan officers in the Japanese SME loan market perform this role in a manner that is consistent with the...

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...