Small banks are a major source of credit for small businesses. As banking consolidation continues, will a resulting decline in the presence of small banks adversely affect the availability of that credit?

The paper uses data on the volume outstanding of small business loans from the midyear Call Reports to summarize the nature of small business lending at banks that were involved in mergers between June 1993 and June 1996. Then a model of gradual adjustment by the consolidated bank following the...

We study the effects of structural changes in banking markets on the supply of credit to small businesses. Specifically, we examine whether bank mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and entry have "external" effects on small business loans by other banks in the same local markets. The results suggest...

We examine the effects of over 6,000 M&As involving more than 10,000 banks on small business lending. We are the first to decompose the impact of M&As into static effects associated with a simple melding of the antecedent institutions and dynamic effects associated with post-M&A refocusing of...

We study the dynamics of market entry following mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and the behavior of recent entrants in supplying output that might be withdrawn by the consolidating firms. The data, drawn from the banking industry, suggest that M&As are associated with subsequent increases in the...

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...