Conventional wisdom holds that small banks have comparative advantages vis-à-vis large banks in serving small firms, while recent literature suggests this may not be the case. Using a panel of recent US start-ups, we investigate how small bank presence affects these firms in normal times...

We investigate how political uncertainty affects the geographic distribution of bank lending to small businesses. Using exogenous variation in gubernatorial elections with binding term limits, we show that political uncertainty causes local banks to increase out-of-state lending to small firms,...

We investigate the effect of sovereign stress and of unconventional monetary policy on small firms' financing patterns during the euro area debt crisis. We find that after the crisis started, firms in stressed countries were more likely to be credit rationed, both in the quantity and in the...