In recent years, the number of large, geographically diversified banking organizations operating in the U.S. has grown. Empirical studies have found that, at least in the case of deposit interest rates, many of these banks offer the same rate for a given type of account throughout a state, or,...

Innovations such as credit scoring have increased the ability of banks to lend to distant business borrowers, which could expand the geographic market for small business loans. However, if this effect is limited to a few large banks, the market may become segmented and lending distance at local...

Because of the increasing significance of credit unions as potential competitors for consumer deposits, this paper examines the impact of the market presence of credit unions, variously measured, on the rates for three different types of consumer deposits offered by banks and thrift...

Regulators and research economists typically view retail banking markets as locally limited, spanning an area that can often be approximated by a metropolitan area or a rural county. Banks are assumed to set retail prices based on the conditions of supply and demand prevailing within these local...

It is frequently claimed that high ATM surcharges actually attract customers to the banks that impose them, particularly if they operate large ATM networks. By exploiting as natural experiments two events associated with the lifting of surcharge bans in Iowa and in the states that neighbor Iowa,...

The literature on network industries and network effects notes that incompatibility across rival systems can influence firms' incentives to invest in product changes that are beneficial to the consumer. We investigate this phenomenon in the case of bank ATM networks, where the number of ATM...

In this paper, we examine the role of market characteristics in explaining the much discussed phenomenon of growth in the number of banking institution branches over time, and the much less discussed phenomenon of decline in the size of the average branch. We note first that substitution of bank...

This paper examines the relationship between multimarket bank presence and the profitability (and therefore viability) of small, single-market banks. We find that increased presence of multimarket banks is associated with a significant reduction in the profitability of small, single-market banks...

In this paper, I use recently collected Community Reinvestment Act loan data to examine how small business lending in local geographic areas (defined as markets) by lenders not physically located in those areas changed between 1996 and 2001. The results show that the importance of quot;outside...