Bank Consolidation and Small Business Lending within Local Markets

The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or the Department of Justice. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Federal Reserve System Conference on Changing Financial Markets and Community Development. The authors would like to thank conference participants James Marino and John O’Keefe for their comments. We also thank Ross Dierdorff and Brian Deitch for assistance with the CRA and census databases, Lynne Montgomery for her editing and Sarah Belanger for her cheerfully putting together our many tables.

Abstract

This paper uses the relatively new CRA small business loan data to examine how bank consolidation has been related to small business lending within a bank’s local community—particularly to borrowers having more modest economic prospects, such as very small businesses or those located in low- and moderate-income areas. The results of multivariate tests indicate that during the late 1990s, banks experiencing merger activity—including banks that did not themselves merge but were part of active holding companies—had systematically lower small business loan growth than inactive banks. But, the effects appear to reflect a general decline in small business lending rather than a shift away from lending to lower-income areas or to very small businesses. At the local level, merger-related effects are more pronounced when the merger activity increases the local market share of the surviving bank or its parent holding company. Thus, our results indicate that, at least in terms of the quantity of credit, the effects of bank consolidation do not appear to fall disproportionately on the businesses having more modest prospects. On the other hand, the market-level analysis indicates that standard antitrust concerns about the provision of local banking services still seem to apply in small business credit markets.

JEL Classifications: G21, G28, G34

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 was intended to encourage insured depository institutions to meet the credit needs of the communities where they are chartered to accept deposits. The primary focus of CRA assessments by bank regulatory agencies has traditionally been on the provision of home mortgage credit, in part because of the availability of data pursuant to the 1975 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA). However, 1995 revisions to the CRA regulations reemphasized and clarified the treatment of lending to small businesses and small farms. One goal of these revisions was to make CRA evaluations more reflective of actual outcomes than of bank lending policies and procedures (Canner [1999]). To this end, the revised CRA regulations require an annual reporting of geographic data on small business and farm lending by larger banking institutions (these data are referred to as the CRA data).

The 1995 CRA regulations raise important questions about how commercial banks and savings institutions—hereinafter referred to as "banks"—choose to serve their communities, particularly in light of the ongoing trend toward bank consolidation. Although concerns have been raised that bank mergers adversely affect small business credit availability, no one has specifically studied the types of small business lending that are likely to qualify for the purposes of CRA assessments—such as loans to businesses in low- and moderate-income (LMI) neighborhoods.¹ In this study, we use the relatively new CRA data to examine how bank merger activity has affected small business lending to particular segments of local banking markets.

Because small banks do not report CRA data, we follow much of the bank consolidation literature in analyzing business lending by individual banks (as opposed to lending in particular geographic areas, such as MSAs or counties). In the taxonomy used by Berger and Udell (1998a), our study is "dynamic" in that we compare changes in small business lending by merging banks over time with changes in such lending by comparable institutions that were not involved in merger activity.

We use the geographic detail in the CRA data to quantify the types of small business lending likely to "count" in terms of CRA assessments—including loans to LMI areas and to very small businesses. We also examine how merger activity affects lending in the specific markets where a bank operates branches. This latter approach allows us to explicitly control for market characteristics and market conditions in measuring merger-related effects. It also allows us to test whether merger-related effects differ for within-market versus out-of-market merger activity and for rural versus urban markets. The goal of this study is not to assess the costs or benefits of the Community Reinvestment Act for any particular constituency. Rather, our goal is to conduct a careful and rigorous analysis of the relatively new CRA data to see whether bank merger activity was systematically related to small business lending within local banking markets during the late 1990s.

Our results indicate that banks experiencing merger activity—including banks that did not themselves merge but were part of holding companies that were acquiring new banks—had systematically lower small business loan growth than banks experiencing no merger activity. At the local level, the evidence suggests that merger-related effects depend on how the merger activity affects local market structure. Specifically, we find that negative merger-related effects in MSA markets are pronounced when the merger activity increases the local market share of the surviving bank or its parent holding company. These findings are consistent with those yielded by other studies that use other data. Specifically, our tests indicate that the effects of bank consolidation on small business lending have an important local dimension, as emphasized by Avery and Samolyk (2000). Thus the evidence suggests that standard antitrust concerns about the provision of local banking services still seem to apply in small business credit markets.

Although our results indicate that merger activity is associated with less small business lending, they also indicate that—at least in terms of the quantity of credit—the effects of bank consolidation do not fall disproportionately on the small business borrowers likely to have more modest economic prospects. This does not necessarily imply that these borrowers are not more vulnerable than other small businesses seeking credit. Indeed, it may mean that the CRA is having its intended effect.

Below, we summarize our efforts to quantify changes in small business lending within local banking markets and relate these changes to bank merger activity using multivariate statistical tests. Section 2 of the paper discusses concerns about bank consolidation for small business lending and research related to this issue. Section 3 discusses some empirical issues involved in using the relatively new CRA data to study the effect of merger activity on small business lending in local banking markets. Section 4 presents tests that measure merger-related differences in small business lending at the bank level. Section 5 presents the results of tests that examine how merger activity is related to a bank’s small business lending in the particular markets that constitute its assessment area. Section 6 concludes.

The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA) was enacted to encourage banking institutions to meet the credit needs of local communities in a manner that is consistant with safe and sound banking practices. For large retail institutions, the evaluation of the extent to which an institution is meeting the "convenience and needs" of its community is based on three tests of CRA compliance: the lending test, the investment test, and the service test. However, current regulations stipulate that a bank cannot receive a composite CRA rating of "satisfactory" or higher unless it scores at least a "low satisfactory" on the lending test.

For the purposes of CRA assessments, the "assessment area" that is defined as constituting a bank’s local community includes regions where it operates deposit-taking branches or where the bank originates a significant proportion of its loans. With respect to a bank’s lending activities, however, the CRA lending test does not stipulate specific performance measures. Rather, the lending test broadly evaluates the extent to which an institution is consistently meeting local credit needs, including the needs of low- and moderate-income borrowers within the communities it serves. Local credit needs can be met through home mortgage lending and small business and small farm lending, as well as through the provision of community development loans.

With respect to business loans, the 1995 revisions to CRA regulations clarified and reemphasized the role of small business lending in CRA evaluations. They also mandated the collection of annual data on small business and farm loan originations. Since 1996, independent banks having assets of at least $250 million and bank affiliates of holding companies that control at least $1 billion in assets have been required to report data on the number and dollar volume of small business and farm loans originated during the calendar year. By "small," the CRA data refer to loans of less than $1 million going to nonfarm businesses of any size ($500,000 for loans to farms). The data also include detail on the small loans extended to "small" firms—that is, businesses having gross annual receipts of less than $1 million. The CRA loan data are aggregates classified by the census tract location of the borrowing business and include separate figures for farms and nonfarm businesses and for three size categories of small loans. Finally, since 1998, for the purposes of CRA evaluations, each bank also reports which census tracts are included in its service area (its assessment area). In this study, we use the geographic CRA data for 1996 through 1999 to study how mergers and acquisitions have affected small business lending to particular segments of the local banking market.

A broad concern associated with the continuing bank consolidation trend is that the merging of banks into larger, more complex organizations may adversely affect the provision of basic banking services to the smaller customers that are more costly to serve. Small business lending has been advanced as a banking product likely to be affected by bank consolidation (Berger and Udell [1996], Avery and Samolyk [2000]) because traditionally this type of lending has been local in nature—often to firms with idiosyncratic credit needs and risks tied to the prospects of the local economy.

Researchers have identified two basic channels by which bank consolidation may adversely affect small business lending. First, as mentioned above, there is the notion that small banks have a comparative advantage in meeting the less-standardized credit needs of small businesses but that large banks have a comparative advantage in providing standardized credit products, such as home mortgages and credit cards. Hence, as banks grow to be larger, more complex organizations, they may shift away from small business lending to more- standardized loan products or larger commercial customers. Second, reduced competition in local markets is more likely to affect small business borrowers, who have fewer alternatives to local banks. Even arguments to the effect that larger banks can take advantage of credit- scoring technologies suggest that bank consolidation will affect which small businesses get credit and at what price.

The implication of the general bank consolidation story for small business lending within the local community is simply that the adverse consequences are more likely to affect the more marginal small business customers—those that are the smallest or whose economic prospects are more modest. And since a bank’s local community includes the markets where it operates branches, the effects of bank consolidation on CRA-type lending may be related to how mergers affect the mix of within-market versus out-of-market lending by merging institutions. For example, if merging banks shift to small business underwriting methods that emphasize credit scoring, consolidation may reduce the extent to which small business credit markets are local (that is, in the sense that loans tend to be made in the markets where banks operate branches). In this scenario it is also likely that the more marginal small business borrowers are those that will be unlikely to qualify for "scored" credit. These considerations suggest that, in the absence of CRA, bank consolidation should be associated with at least a relative decline in lending to more marginal small business borrowers.

CRA considerations, however, should cause banks to be less inclined to reduce their focus on customers that "count" in terms of CRA evaluation. But, consolidating institutions may shift their CRA-related lending focus to home mortgage lending, which has become a standardized product well suited to larger, more organizationally complex banking organizations. This shift would be consistent with merger-related declines in small business lending, along with declines to more marginal business customers.

Numerous studies have examined how mergers and acquisitions affect a bank’s overall small business lending.² Most of these studies use bank-level small business loan data reported since 1993 in mid year Reports of Condition and Income.³ They compare lending by "merging" banks with lending by "nonmerging" banks and test whether there are systematic differences associated with merger activity. The results of these studies depend on how changes in small business lending are measured, what time period is studied, and how bank merger activity is defined.⁴ But the evidence broadly indicates negative merger-related effects associated with mergers involving larger banks or more concentrated markets, whereas acquisitions by smaller or more active small business lenders have been associated with more small business lending by the surviving banks.⁵ 

Before the fairly recent availability of the CRA data, it was difficult to assess the implications of bank consolidation for small business lending within local markets, particularly lending to LMI neighborhoods. To our knowledge, no one has yet used the CRA data to study this specific issue. Canner (1999) examines the relationship between bank CRA nonfarm business lending patterns and neighborhood characteristics, using data from the 1990 Census of Population and Housing on tract-level income and racial/ethnic composition, and using Dun & Bradstreet data on the geographic distribution of large and small businesses. This study does not, however, investigate how factors such as bank mergers are related to changes in small business lending patterns over time. CRA business loan data have also been used to study the competitiveness of local banking markets and the importance of out-of-market lenders (see, for example, Cyrnak [1998]). But these studies generally do not explicitly test conjectures about the effects of mergers; nor do they focus on the types of business lending likely to count for the purposes of CRA assessments.

Our empirical strategy follows much of the bank consolidation literature in analyzing small business lending at the bank level, comparing changes in small business lending over time by merging banks with changes observed for comparable institutions that were not involved in merger activity. There are a number of ways in which one can measure changes in lending over time. Bank-level small business lending studies have tended to examine changes in small business lending as a proportion of total bank assets (or total commercial loans). Studies of credit availability at the market level have tended to examine changes in the amount of small business lending (or in loan growth rates). Here we focus on loan growth rates—albeit at the bank level rather than at an aggregated market level.

We estimate reduced-form multivariate regressions to test for systematic differences in small business loan growth among banks experiencing merger activity compared with inactive banks. Throughout, we studied samples of commercial banks and samples that included both commercial banks and savings institutions. Although our empirical strategy seems straightforward, the nature of the data collected and the inherent geographic dimension of the lending being studied pose formidable issues in the execution of a study of this type. These issues are summarized below and presented in detail in Appendix 1 of this study.

The most obvious limitation of the CRA data from a research perspective is that only a subset of banks must report these data.⁶ For example, it is difficult to study overall credit availability using the CRA small business loan data because many small banks do not report these data.⁷ The exemption of small banks from CRA reporting also affects the samples of banks that we can use in this study because we cannot include banks for which we do not have complete CRA data for a given study period. Hence, our study samples exclude non-CRA reporting banks and new CRA reporters—those that reported at the end of a given study period but not at the beginning. More importantly, to accurately measure changes in small business lending by banks that have acquired other banks, we must also exclude CRA-reporting banks that acquired non-CRA reporting banks during a given study period (see Appendix 1 for more detail).

We study the growth of small business lending during two 2-year study periods (comparing 1998 loan originations with 1996 loan originations, and 1999 loan originations with 1997 originations). We chose to use these 2-year study intervals because we believe they are long enough for the effects of merger activity on lending to manifest themselves in the calendar year CRA loan origination data.⁸

We use the geographic detail in the CRA data and U.S. Census Bureau data to quantify small business lending to particular segments of local banking markets.⁹ Unfortunately, banks were not required to include information about their assessment areas in their CRA filings for 1996 and 1997. Therefore, we approximate each bank’s assessment areas using annual Summary of Deposit (SOD) data on bank branch locations reported every June. Although banks have been required to report their CRA assessment areas since 1998, we must use our method of approximating bank assessment areas for our entire study period so as to measure small business lending consistently throughout each sample period.¹⁰

We constructed three measures of the types of small business lending (SBL) likely to count for the purposes of CRA assessments. Assessment Area SBL includes small loans (less than $1 million) to businesses located in the markets where the bank operates branches. Assessment Area LMI SBL includes small loans to businesses located in low- and moderate-income (LMI) neighborhoods in markets where the bank operates branches. And CRA-Type SBL includes Assessment Area LMI SBL plus SBL to small firms (annual sales of less than $1 million) located in non-LMI parts of a bank’s deposit market. The latter two measures attempt to capture lending to the more "marginal" small business borrowers, who (according to the bank consolidation story) are more likely to be adversely affected by merger activity.

Along with measures of assessment area lending, we also examine two broader measures of small business lending in order to more fully interpret observed patterns in the CRA data: (1) a bank’s Total SBL (both within and outside of its assessment area) and (2) a bank’s Total LMI-area SBL (both within and outside of its assessment area). We use these measures to assess how observed changes in small business lending within a bank’s local banking markets compare with changes in its overall small business lending.¹¹

An issue, however, in any study of small business lending from a CRA perspective is how one deals with changes in a bank’s assessment area over time when measuring changes in local lending over time. Banks change their assessment areas as they change the geographic markets they serve, and this can affect which of their small business loans "count" for the purposes of CRA assessments. For example, if a bank expands its branching network to areas where it already makes small business loans, there can be an increase in the bank’s "reported" assessment area SBL simply because the bank has broadened its assessment area. On the other hand, when a bank exits a market as a deposit taker (as part of a divestiture or otherwise), the bank may continue to make small business loans to the area¾ loans that will no longer count as assessment area small business lending if the market is dropped from the bank’s assessment area.¹² Changes in a bank’s assessment area may be associated with a bank merger, but nonmerging banks also change their geographic banking patterns over time.

In this study, we examine two types of Assessment Area (AA) loan growth measures. In terms of our tests of how mergers affect small business lending at the bank level, we report what we refer to as changes in "reported AA" lending. Changes in reported AA lending compare what a bank (and any bank it acquires) would report as assessment area lending at the beginning of the period with what it reports two years later.¹³ Reported AA loan growth measures do not attempt to net out changes in lending associated with assessment area changes.

However, one might want to net out changes in reported AA lending due solely to changes in a bank’s AA so as to study the bank’s actual lending to a particular market. What we refer to as "pro forma AA" loan growth measures actual changes in lending to markets where a bank (or its acquisitions) operated branches at the beginning of the period.¹⁴ Below, we use pro forma AA loan growth measures in testing how merger activity affects a bank’s lending to each of its assessment area markets (or those of its acquisitions). Thus, we focus on what happens to the actual credit supplied by a bank (and its acquisitions) to a given market—irrespective of what would have counted for the purposes of CRA assessments.

Another issue that must be addressed in any bank consolidation study is how to characterize bank merger activity. A range of legal changes in bank structure are associated with increasing concentration of banking sector assets—including consolidations of holding company affiliates, mergers of unaffiliated banks, and bank acquisitions by holding companies that do not involve a merger into a holding company affiliate. The important consideration for credit availability is simply that different types of mergers may have very different implications for the behavior of the surviving banks. For example, consolidations of holding company affiliates are sometimes thought to have little effect on bank behavior because the parties were already part of the same holding company. level; but for holding company (HC) affiliates, we also specify whether the parent HC is actively acquiring new banks, since broader structural changes within a holding company may affect the behavior of affiliates even if they do not merge. Hence our measure of any merger activity includes the following six distinct "types" of merger activity:

1. Unaffiliated merger(s): The bank merges with at least one previously unaffiliated bank.

2. Affiliate merger(s)/active HC: The bank acquires only previously affiliated banks, but it is part of an HC that acquires at least one unaffiliated bank.

3. Affiliate merger(s)/inactive HC: The bank acquires only HC affiliates, and the only merger activity within the parent HC involves the consolidation of affiliates.

4. No merger/ new HC: The bank does not merge with another bank, but it is acquired by a new HC (the HC is therefore active by our definition).

5. No merger/active HC: The bank is not involved in merger activity, but it is part of a holding company that acquired at least one unaffiliated bank.

6. Inactive: The bank is not involved in merger activity, and its HC parent has not acquired any previously unaffiliated banks.

For each study sample, we classify the merger activity of each surviving bank during a two-year interval (year-end 1996 through year-end 1998, or year-end 1997 through year-end 1999). Inactive banks serve as the base group that we compare with "active" banks, i.e., categories one through five above.

Below we summarize the results of multivariate tests that relate small business loan growth to these types of bank merger activity.¹⁵ We ran all tests for study samples that include savings institutions and commercial banks and for study samples that include only commercial banks. The results are broadly consistent. However, since savings institutions tend to do relatively small amounts of business lending, we focus below on the commercial bank results. Comparable results for samples that also include savings institutions are reported in Appendix 2. All regressions are estimated using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS).

Our bank-level multivariate tests measure the relationship between a bank’s small business loan growth and whether it experienced merger activity, controlling for its characteristics and financial condition. Panel A of table 1 reports the distributions of our commercial bank study samples, classified by the nature of bank merger activity as discussed above. As this table indicates, in each study period we were able to identify approximately 750 commercial banks for which there are complete CRA data (for the survivor as well as for all banks that the survivor absorbed). Roughly half of the banks in each study sample were not involved in merger or acquisition activity of any type during the period (and were not part of an "active" holding company). Around a third were not directly involved in merger or acquisition activity but were affiliated with a holding company that had actively acquired at least one institution. The remaining institutions merged with other institutions or were acquired by new holding companies during the sample period. Unfortunately, for some specific classifications of merger activity we have a relatively small number of observations.

The bank-level tests for merger-related differences in small business lending can be specified by the following general reduced-form model:

Loan Growth_{i,( t,t-2)} = f(Merger Activity_{,i, (t,,t-2)}, Bank Characteristics and Conditions _i,t-2)+error,[D]

which measures the relationships between small business loan growth by bank i during the sample period and whether it experienced merger activity during the sample period, controlling for its characteristics and financial condition as of the beginning of the study period.

Tests that measure the effects associated with any merger activity include a dummy variable that equals 1 if a bank experienced any of the types of merger activity listed in panel A. The coefficients on this variable measure the average difference in small business loan growth for "active" banks versus those that were not affected by any type of merger activity (inactive banks). Tests that measure the effects associated with specific types of merger activity include a set of dummy variables indicating the specific type of merger activity experienced by each active bank.¹⁶ The coefficients on these variables measure (average) loan growth differentials for each particular types of merger activity (listed in table 1) compared with inactive banks.

Panel B of table 1, lists the control variables included in the bank-level tests. Control variables include dummy variables indicating each bank’s asset size class, minority-owned banks, credit card lenders, and the census division in which each bank is headquartered.¹⁷ Control variables measuring a bank’s condition include its ratio of net loan charge-offs to total loans and leases; its ratio of nonperforming assets to total assets; its annual return on assets; and its ratio of total commercial loans to total assets. All of the bank-level control variables are measured as of the beginning of a study period, before the occurrence of any merger activity. For banks that acquire others during the study period, control variables are measured on a merger-adjusted basis when appropriate.

Although not reported below, we also estimated comparable specifications that include contemporaneous asset growth (measured on a merger-adjusted basis) as a right-hand-side variable. The merger dummies in these specifications measure merger-related differences in small business loan growth over and above that which is associated with bank asset growth during the same period.¹⁸

The panels in Table 2 report the results of the bank-level tests. As indicated in Panel A, we find evidence that merger activity was negatively associated with the growth of small business lending in both of our study periods. However, the merger-related effects appear to be associated with an overall decline in small business lending rather than with a shift away from loans to LMI areas or to very small businesses.

Panel B of Table 2 reports the coefficient estimates on the merger variables in tests that replace the any-merger dummy with variables indicating specific types of merger activity. The results indicate negative merger-related effects for banks that acquired previously unaffiliated institutions, but also for banks that did not directly experience merger activity but were part of active holding companies. Of course, in studies that analyze lending at the holding-company level (such as Strahan and Weston [1998]), lending by all parts of an active holding company would be "counted" in quantifying merger-related effects.

Although our tests indicate that the active banks have lower small business loan growth, the effects of merger activity do not appear to fall disproportionately on very small businesses or those located in low-and moderate-income areas. This does not necessarily imply that these borrowers are not more marginal than other small businesses seeking credit. Indeed, it may mean that the CRA is having its intended effect. We do, however, advise caution in focusing on the precise magnitude of estimated merger-related growth differentials. The manner in which one deals with extreme loan growth rates can affect the averages measured for different groups and therefore the differentials across groups.

5. By-Bank/By-Market Tests

Bank-level tests may obscure differences in small business lending that are associated with the characteristics of, and conditions in, the particular markets where a bank operates. Hence we also conducted multivariate tests that examine how bank merger activity is related to small business loan growth in each of the particular markets that constituted a bank’s assessment area.¹⁹ These tests allow us to control for the characteristics of, and the conditions in, the local markets where a bank operates (as well as for the bank’s characteristics and condition) in measuring merger-related effects. These tests also allow us to see if the effects of merger activity depend on whether the activity affects the local market share of the surviving institution—that is, whether the merger activity involves firms that both operated in the market before the merger activity. Again, we discuss our results for commercial banks. Comparable results for samples that also include savings institutions are presented in Appendix 2.

We want to focus on how merger activity affects the actual amount of lending provided by the bank to a given market relative to what the bank (and/or any bank that it acquired) provided at the beginning of the sample period. Hence for each bank in our bank-level samples, we calculated the dollar growth of small business lending in each of its pro forma AA markets (defined at the beginning of a given study period).²⁰ We compiled these records into a by-bank/by-market data set that includes a set of market-level records for each bank. Again, we are measuring the change in actual lending by a bank (and/or its acquisitions) to a market; this may not correspond to "reported" assessment area loan growth—even for inactive banks.²¹

We use metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) and rural counties to approximate urban and rural banking markets, respectively. Because related research suggests that merger-related effects can differ for urban and rural markets, we split our by-bank/by-market samples into urban and rural sub-samples and fit separate models for each sub-sample.

In measuring for merger-related effects, we use the same merger classifications as in the bank-level tests. However, for each by-bank/by-market observation, we also classify the bank’s merger activity by whether it increased the local market share of the surviving bank (or its parent); that is, whether merger activity involved two parties that already operated branches in the market.²² We use the term within-market merger activity to refer to merger activity that increases the bank’s (or parent HC’s) local market share; otherwise, we use the Table 3 summarizes the distribution of our by-bank/by-market samples for commercial banks in terms of these types of merger activity. As this panel indicates, the by-bank/by-market samples are larger than the bank-level samples because larger banks generally operate in more than one market. The shares of observations associated with some type of merger activity are higher in these samples than in the bank-level samples. This indicates that larger multi-market banks were more likely to experience merger activity than smaller banks that operated in fewer markets. Still, we have relatively few observations on some specific types of merger activity, particularly within-market activity.

The by-bank/by-market tests can be specified by the general reduced form model

These tests relate loan growth in market j by bank i to bank i’s merger activity and whether it affects bank i’s market share in market j (as described by Panel A of Table 3 ).

The by-bank/by-market tests that measure the effects associated with any merger activity include two dummy variables that indicate whether a bank experienced any type of merger activity and whether the activity was within-market or out-of-market. We also ran tests that included dummy variables that classify merger activity by its specific type and by whether it involved an increase in the bank's local market share. Again, the coefficients on the merger variables measure (average) loan growth differentials for each particular type of merger activity compared with inactive banks.

The multivariate tests reported here include the same set of bank-level control variables that was used in the bank-level tests. (All of the market-level records for any given bank i include that bank’s control variables.) These tests also include a set of market-level control variables that measure local banking market characteristics and economic conditions. Each of the market-level records for bank i will have a different set of market-level controls, reflecting the particular conditions in each of its markets. Thus we are estimating merger-related differences in loan growth, controlling for the specific conditions in the particular local markets where any given bank operates.

Panel B of Table 3 lists the market-level control variables included in the multivariate tests. Control variables are measured as of the beginning of the indicated study period—before any merger activity. First, we include the bank’s share of the local small business loan market as a control because future loan growth in a particular market is likely to be negatively related to the bank’s current market penetration in that particular market-irrespective of merger activity. Our measures of local banking market characteristics include the local deposit market Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), the share of the local deposit market held by large commercial banks (assets of more than $1B), the share of the local deposit market held by savings institutions; and the share of the local small business loan market funded by local institutions (that is, institutions operating branches in the market). Our measures of local conditions include local deposit market growth; the logged value of the market’s population (a measure of market size); population growth during the preceding two years; and per capita income growth during the preceding two years. We also included a set of dummy variables that indicate the census division in which the market is located.

Table 5 lists the coefficient estimates from regressions that replace the dummy variables indicating any merger activity with those indicating specific types of merger activity. Some differences exist across rural and urban markets and across the two study periods. In rural markets, negative merger-related differentials are most consistently evident for unaffiliated mergers—with both within-market and out-of-market mergers—and for inactive banks whose HC parents are acquiring banks in other markets. Interestingly, in the later sample period, inactive banks whose parents are acquiring other banks in the same market exhibited significantly higher local small business loan growth. For both rural and urban markets, banks that were acquired by a holding company that was already operating in the market evidenced dramatically lower loan growth than inactive banks. In MSA markets, the merger-related effects are most consistently evident when a merger is between previously unaffiliated banks—particularly when the merger increases the survivor’s local market share. Again, the results for commercial banks are broadly comparable to those obtained for all institutions (Appendix 2).

The evidence obtained at the market level is interesting from an antitrust perspective as well as from a community development perspective. Despite conjectures that banking markets are no longer as local as traditionally defined, these results suggest that small business borrowers may still be affected by banking conditions in a fairly localized area. Moreover, this finding is consistent with findings reported by Avery and Samolyk (2000), who study the effects of consolidation on small business lending at the local market level using completely different data on small business loans. The results in this paper do suggest that standard antitrust methodology would still seem to apply in small business credit markets with small business lending markets still appearing to be fairly local. However, the results presented here indicate that, at least in terms of quantity of credit, the effects of bank consolidation do not fall disproportionately on the small business borrowers whose economic prospects are likely to be more modest.

To our knowledge, this paper is the first to use the CRA data to explicitly examine how bank consolidation was related to small business lending during the late 1990s. As we discuss, the limited reporting of these data complicated our examination and represents an important caveat in interpreting the evidence presented here. Nonetheless, our bank-level multivariate tests yield evidence that banks experiencing merger activity—including banks that are part of an active company, but are not themselves directly involved in a merger or an acquisition — had systematically lower small business loan growth than inactive banks. These merger-related effects, however, appear to be associated with an overall decline in small business lending rather than with a shift away from lending to LMI areas or to very small businesses within a bank’s service area.

The evidence yielded by an examination of specific banking markets suggests that bank-level analyses can obscure merger-related effects that occur at the local level. Specifically, we find significantly lower small business loan growth associated with within-market merger activity—that is, merger activity that increases the local market share of the surviving institutions—particularly in urban markets. For practical purposes, therefore, the evidence suggests that bank antitrust polices have important implications for small business lending.

We do, however, advise caution in extrapolating the evidence presented here (on CRA-filing institutions) to all banks. First, as Call Report data on small business lending indicate, small banks tend to do commensurately more small business lending, relative to their share of industry assets than do large banks. We also find that smaller CRA reporters consistently have substantially higher small business loan growth than their large counterparts. Hence, the exemption of many small banks from the CRA reporting requirement is particularly unfortunate from the perspective of small business research. For example, in using the CRA data to study the effects of bank merger activity, we had to drop institutions from our study samples if they merged with non-CRA reporters (or if they themselves were a CRA-reporters at the beginning of a given study period). Because non-CRA reporters are smaller banks, our study samples are not representative of all banks or all bank mergers. Since we had to exclude any bank that acquired a small non-CRA reporter, our results are less likely to characterize effects associated with mergers involving small banks.

Finally, this study does not imply that banks ignore CRA obligations, or take them more lightly, in their post-merger environments. The next step in this research project is to examine whether the merger-related effects reported here may reflect a shift in CRA-related lending from business lending to home mortgage lending. Such a shift would be consistent with conjectures regarding bank scale and bank product mix.

Avery, R. B., R. W. Bostic, P.S., Calem and G.B. Canner. 1999. Trends in Home Purchase

Lending: Consolidation and the Community Reinvestment Act. Federal Reserve Bulletin, Vol. 85:81-102.

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