Stylized facts suggest that bank lending behavior is highly procyclical. We offer a new hypothesis that may help explain why this occurs. The institutional memory hypothesis is driven by deterioration in the ability of loan officers over the bank's lending cycle that results in an easing of...

Banking industry consolidation has raised concern about the supply of small business credit since large banks generally invest lower proportions of their assets in small business loans. However, we find that the likelihood that a small business borrows from a bank of a given size is roughly...

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...

This paper models the inner workings of relationship lending, the implications for bank organizational structure, and the effects of shocks to the economic environment on the availability of relationship credit to small businesses. Relationship lending depends on the accumulation over time by...

We test hypotheses about the effects of bank size, foreign ownership, and distress on lending to informationally opaque small firms using a rich new data set on Argentinean banks, firms, and loans. We also test hypotheses about borrowing from a single bank versus multiple banks. Our results...