Discrimination in Bank Lending Policies: A Test Using Data from the Bank of Nova Scotia 1900-37.

The authors use data on 460 loans made to individual firms by the Bank of Nova Scotia, together with information on the location, capital size, and activity type of each of these firms, to test for the existence of discriminatory lending policies. Their analysis indicates that there were marked differences in the amounts that firms of different types and in different locations actually borrowed. However, none of the results provides clear-cut support for the discrimination hypotheses in the secondary literature, including the suggestion that Canadian banks discriminated against manufacturing firms.