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Working Paper
Do Small Businesses Still Prefer Community Banks?
We formulate and test hypotheses about the role of bank type ? small versus large, single-market versus multimarket, and local versus nonlocal banks ? in banking relationships. The conventional paradigm suggests that "community banks" ? small, single market, local institutions ? are better able to form strong relationships with informationally opaque small businesses, while "megabanks" ? large, multimarket, nonlocal institutions ? tend to serve more transparent firms. Using the 2003 Survey of Small Business Finance (SSBF), we conduct two sets of tests. First, we test for the type of bank ...