Small firms often rely on banks as a means of external financial support.This study looks at the relationship between community financial institutions (CFIs) and small businesses in order to determine if CFIs provide better banking outcomes to small businesses.Past studies by Berger et al....

This paper addresses two questions related to the ongoing consolidation of the US banking industry and its effect on small firm financing. First, are conventional measures of market structure (e.g. geographic market size and deposit concentration) related to bank competition for small firm...

Critics claim that theories of secured debt fail to explain the widespread use of collateral because they incorrectly predict when a loan will be secured. This paper provides the first rigorous statistical test of the transaction cost models of secured debt. Data from two samples of over 1,000...