Small Business Credit Availability and Relationship Lending: The Importance of Bank Organisational Structure

Abstract

This paper models the inner workings of relationship lending, the implications for bank organisational structure, and the effects of shocks to the economic environment on the availability of relationship credit to small businesses. Relationship lending depends on the accumulation over time by the loan officer of 'soft' information. Because the loan officer is the repository of this soft information, agency problems are created throughout the organisation that may best be resolved by structuring the bank as a small, closely-held organisation with few managerial layers. The shocks analysed include technological innovations, regulatory regime shifts, banking industry consolidation, and monetary policy shocks. The issue of credit availability to small firms has garnered world-wide concern recently. Models of equilibrium credit rationing that point to moral hazard and adverse selection problems (eg, Stiglitz and Weiss, 1981) suggest that small firms may be particularly vulnerable because they are often so informationally opaque. That is, the informational wedge between insiders and outsiders tends to be more acute for small companies, which makes the provision of external finance particularly challenging. Small firms with opportunities to invest in positive net present value projects may be blocked from doing so because potential providers of external finance cannot readily verify that the firm has access to a quality project (adverse selection problem) or ensure that the funds will not be diverted to fund an alternative project (moral hazard problem).