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Using exogenous liquidity windfalls from oil and natural gas shale discoveries, we demonstrate that bank branch networks help integrate U.S. lending markets. Banks exposed to shale booms enjoy liquidity inflows, which increase their capacity to originate and hold new loans. Exposed banks increase mortgage lending in nonboom counties, but only where they have branches and only for hard-to-securitize mortgages. Our findings suggest that contracting frictions limit the ability of arm's length finance to integrate credit markets fully. Branch networks continue to play an important role in financial integration, despite the development of securitization markets.

This paper uses detailed data from an online peer-to-peer lending intermediary to test whether local access to finance affects consumers’ willingness to pay for loans. After controlling for local economic conditions and borrower credit quality, we find that borrowers who reside in areas with good access to bank finance request loans with lower interest rates. This effect is stronger for borrowers with poor credit and those seeking small loans, suggesting that local access to finance is more important for marginal borrowers. Overall, our findings shed light on how consumers substitute between alternative sources of finance. This paper was accepted by Wei Jiang, finance .

Using geographic differences in the availability of payday loans, I estimate the real effects of credit access among low-income households. Payday loans are small, high interest rate loans that constitute the marginal source of credit for many high risk borrowers. I find no evidence that payday loans alleviate economic hardship. To the contrary, loan access leads to increased difficulty paying mortgage, rent and utilities bills. The empirical design isolates variation in loan access that is uninfluenced by lenders' location decisions and state regulatory decisions, two factors that might otherwise correlate with economic hardship measures. Further analysis of differences in loan availability—over time and across income groups—rules out a number of alternative explanations for the estimated effects. Counter to the view that improving credit access facilitates important expenditures, the results suggest that for some low-income households the debt service burden imposed by borrowing inhibits their ability to pay important bills.

This paper provides novel evidence on the real and financial market effects of legal institutions. Our analysis exploits persistent and externally imposed differences in court enforcement that arose when the U.S. Congress assigned state courts to adjudicate contracts on a subset of Native American reservations. Using area-specific data on small business lending, we find that reservations assigned to state courts, which enforce contracts more predictably than tribal courts, have stronger credit markets. Moreover, the law-driven component of credit market development is associated with significantly higher per capita income, with stronger effects in sectors that depend more on external financing.

Does bank branch density matter for the conservative financing puzzle? This paper looks at the importance of nearby physical banking services to the decision to eschew debt among SMEs. Our multivariate logistic models rely on recent information from Portugal, a small open bank-based European economy, and control for firm-level and municipality-level effects. We show that banks' branch density at the municipality level increases the odds of local SMEs following a conservative financing policy. However, the weight of local cooperative bank branches relates negatively to the odds of not using debt. Several robustness checks concerning sampling procedures, estimation methods, and variables’ definitions corroborate our baseline results. Moreover, our results show that the effect of bank branches on the decision to eschew debt is economically more relevant for the long-term than the short-term debt.Plain English SummaryHigher bank branch density fosters the decision to avoid debt among SMEs in a given municipality. Based on multivariate logistic models and recent information from Portugal, a small open bank-based European economy, and controlling for firm-level and municipality-level effects, we show that bank branch density at the municipality level increases the odds of local SMEs following a conservative financing policy, an effect that is most pronounced for long-term debt. Several robustness checks confirm our baseline results. We highlight two main implications of our study. First, SMEs should not ignore the potential benefits of using debt taking for granted the greater availability of credit suggested by the higher density of bank branches. Second, in the current context of increased digitalization of the financial services market, firms should recognize banks’ digital information channels as a feature of the business environment, so as not to be ignored in the credit market.

This paper investigates the role of local context, with regard to the effect of local financial development and banking concentration, on a firm’s probability of bankruptcy at the post-creation stage. Our empirical setting is based on the logit multilevel model that better allows the treatment of data referring to different levels of aggregation (firm and local variables) applied to companies located in Italy. We find that a higher level of financial development in a province decreases the likelihood of corporate bankruptcy. This result is robust considering a 2SLS regression in which we use instruments for the local financial development and for the concentration of bank branches. In addition, our estimations suggest that the effect of local financial development and bank concentration is shaped by size. Local financial development is particularly significant for small firms, which traditionally suffer from great difficulty in accessing credit, whereas local banking concentration reduces the probability of bankruptcy for medium-sized firms.

We study the effects of differences in local financial development within an integrated financial market. We construct a new indicator of financial development by estimating a regional effect on the probability that, ceteris paribus, a household is shut off from the credit market. By using this indicator, we find that financial development enhances the probability an individual starts his own business, favors entry of new firms, increases competition, and promotes growth. As predicted by theory, these effects are weaker for larger firms, which can more easily raise funds outside of the local area. These effects are present even when we instrument our indicator with the structure of the local banking markets in 1936, which, because of regulatory reasons, affected the supply of credit in the following 50 years. Overall, the results suggest local financial development is an important determinant of the economic success of an area even in an environment where there are no frictions to capital movements.

This paper studies the impact of local financial structure on business relocation in the US from 2011 to 2015. It uses several proxies to measure the local financial structure at the county level, such as the average distance to the nearest commercial bank branch from a relocating establishment (operational distance), the average distance between bank branches and their headquarters (functional distance), the bank geographic concentration ratio, the amount of small business loans recorded under the Community Reinvestments Act (CRA), and the amount of bank deposits. The results show that operational distance has a negative effect on business relocation, particularly in metro counties, while functional distance has a positive effect. Additionally, the study found a negative relationship between banking market concentration and business relocation and a positive relationship between CRA loans and bank deposits with relocations. These findings are largely unchanged in terms of the direction of the effect and statistical significance with respect various robustness checks. When estimates are conducted based on the size and age of the relocating businesses, the results are likewise generally similar, with some small differences in terms of direction and statistical significance.

Does financial development facilitate micro-entrepreneurship? Using randomized surveys of over 1 million Indian households and bank-branch location as predetermined by government policy, we find that access to finance shifts workers from informal micro-entrepreneurship into formal employment. Financial access reduces the likelihood of being self-employed but benefits micro-enterprises with employees, as well as formal firms. Using data on 400,000 firms, we find that in districts with more banks, firms have higher loans, productivity, employment, and wages than firms in less banked districts. This evidence suggests a labor-market mechanism by which financial development facilitates growth: by shifting workers from unproductive micro-entrepreneurship into productive employment.