In this paper, we document a practice in the processes of loan screenings and term settings by regional financial institutions and the extent of the use of qualitative information in these processes based upon the data collected by our originally -designed questionnaire survey on financial...

The question of whether more competition among banks increases relationship banking, which is predicted to improve credit availability for informationally opaque firms in theory, is a controversial issue in the banking literature. By using firm-level survey data in Japan, this paper provides...

We empirically examine the impact of bank consolidation on bank acquisition of soft information about borrowers. Using a dataset of small business financing, we find that mergers of small banks have a negative impact on soft information acquisition, whereas mergers of large banks have no impact....