We test whether rural versus urban location, and the amount of social capital present in those locations, influence the performance of Small Business Administration (SBA) 7(a) loans originated between 1984 and 2012. On average, we find that rural loans are about 11% less likely to default than...

We assess the effects of geographic expansion on bank efficiency, using cost and profit efficiencies estimated for over 7000 U.S. banks from 1993 to 1998. We find both positive and negative links between geographic scope and bank efficiency. Parent organizations exercise some control over the...

We construct a degree-of-total-leverage framework to test whether and how shifts in product mix affect earnings volatility at 472 U.S. commercial banks between 1988 and 1995. Our framework, which accounts for cost and revenue synergies not captured in most previous studies, conceptually links...

Foreign-owned U.S. banks have been chronically unprofitable for more than a decade. We employ a profit efficiency model introduced by Berger, Hancock, and Humphrey (1993), modified to be less sensitive to variations in asset size, to estimate the relative profit efficiency of 62 foreign-owned...

The number of newly chartered, or 'de novo,' commercial banks in the U.S. has increased every year since 1994. These new banks are potentially important for preserving competition and providing credit in consolidating banking markets. However, like other new business ventures, newly chartered...

This paper address the relationship between the aging process at new and relatively young banks and the tendency of banks to make loans to small businesses. Defining small business loans as Camp;I loans that are under $1 million in size, we analyze a sample of banks that had assets of less than...

We review how deregulation, technological advance, and increased competitive rivalry have affected the size and health of the United States community banking sector and the quality and availability of banking products and services. We then develop a simple theoretical framework for analyzing how...

Deregulation and technological change are transforming U.S. commercial banking from an industry dominated by thousands of small, locally focused banks into an industry where a handful of large banks could potentially span the nation and control the majority of its bank deposits. This paper...

We address the causes, consequences, and implications of the cross-border consolidation of financial institutions by reviewing several hundred studies, providing comparative international data, and estimating cross-border banking efficiency in France, Germany, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S....