Microloans, also known as microfinancing, peer-to-peer lending, and crowdfunding, started out as a means for individuals, such as impoverished borrowers who lack collateral and underprivileged women in third world countries, to provide for themselves. The way microloan markets operate is quite...

Nationwide in the U.S. over the past 15 years, small businesses generated 64 percent of the net new job growth. Small businesses with fewer than 500 employees, a definition used by the Small Business Administration (SBA), represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms, and employ more than half of...

Historically, small businesses have tended to turn to local lenders for credit. In recent years, however, technological advances in processing information and assessing credit risk have raised the potential for loosening the geographic ties between small business borrowers and lenders. This...

In the presence of imperfect information, both large and small banks try to find alternative ways to identify creditworthy borrowers. Lending relationships are one way to go about this. Relationships between banks and small businesses tend to be much closer than those between banks and large...

This Economic Letter examines what the data say about the relationship between the degree of competition in and total volume of small business lending in local geographic banking markets.

Since the Great Recession, bank lending to small businesses has fallen significantly, and policymakers have become concerned that these businesses are not getting the credit they need. Many reasons have been suggested for the decline. Our analysis shows that it has multiple sources, which means...

There is a steady call for policies and programs to help small business lead the charge in hiring more workers and helping to restore prosperity to areas that have been hurt by the recession. To be successful, however, it is time for academics, policymakers, investors, community leaders, and...

Providing efficiency and cost-savings over paper payments (cash and checks), commercial payment cards are among the fastest growing card segments in recent years. Today, they account for nearly one in every five dollars spent using general-purpose payment cards. And since business and government...