In the early 1990s, a widely shared opinion among scholars and practitioners was that the importance of physical proximity between banks and borrowers would be doomed to decrease drastically over time and, put in extreme terms, the end of banking geography would become a real possibility....

Traditionally female entrepreneurs report difficulties or higher costs in accessing bank credit. These difficulties can be either the result of supply side discrimination, or the lower profitability of female-owned firms than male-owned ones. This paper aims at analyzing the access to credit of...

A puzzling but consistent result in the empirical literature on banking is that firms with close bank ties do not grow faster than bank-independent firms. In this paper, we reconsider the link between relationship lending and firms' growth, distinguishing firms by size and “health”. The idea...

The theoretical literature has identified potential benefits and costs of close bank-firm relationships for both parties, suggesting possible reasons for firms being captured by banks and vice versa. In this paper we empirically explore the effects of long-lasting credit relationships on...