W. Scott Frame

The Effect of Credit Scoring on Small-Business Lending

This paper examines the effect of credit scoring on small-business lending for a sample of large U. S. banking organizations. We find that credit scoring is associated with an 8.4 percent increase in the portfolio share of small-business loans, or

Small business credit scoring and credit availability

4 billion per institution. However, we fail to uncover any specific attributes of bank small-business credit-scoring programs that lead to this increased lending. Overall, we conclude that credit scoring lowers information costs between borrowers and lenders, thereby reducing the value of traditional, local bank lending relationships.

Empirical Studies of Financial Innovation: Lots of Talk, Little Action?

U.S. commercial banks are increasingly using small business credit‐scoring models to underwrite small business credits. The paper discusses this lending technology, evaluates the research findings on the effects of this technology on small business credit availability, and links these findings to a number of research and policy issues.

Why do borrowers pledge collateral? New empirical evidence on the role of asymmetric information

This paper reviews the extant empirical studies of financial innovation. Adopting broad criteria, the authors found just two dozen studies, over half of which (fourteen) had been conducted since 2000. Since some financial innovations are examined by more than one study, only fourteen distinct phenomena have been covered. Especially striking is the fact that only two studies are directed at the hypotheses advanced in many broad descriptive articles concerning the environmental conditions (e.g., regulation, taxes, unstable macroeconomic conditions, and ripe technologies) spurring financial innovation. The authors offer some tentative conjectures as to why empirical studies of financial innovation are comparatively rare. Among their suggested culprits is an absence of accessible data. The authors urge financial regulators to undertake more surveys of financial innovation and to make the survey data more available to researchers.

Tests of Ex Ante Versus Ex Post Theories of Collateral Using Private and Public Information

An important theoretical literature motivates collateral as a mechanism that mitigates adverse selection, credit rationing, and other inefficiencies that arise when borrowers hold ex ante private information. There is no clear empirical evidence regarding the central implication of this literature—that a reduction in asymmetric information reduces the incidence of collateral. We exploit exogenous variation in lender information related to the adoption of an information technology that reduces ex ante private information, and compare collateral outcomes before and after adoption. Our results are consistent with this central implication of the private-information models and support the empirical importance of this theory.

Debt Maturity, Risk, and Asymmetric Information

Collateral is a widely used, but not well understood, debt contracting feature. Two broad strands of theoretical literature explain collateral as arising from the existence of either ex ante private information or ex post incentive problems between borrowers and lenders. However, the extant empirical literature has been unable to isolate each of these effects. This paper attempts to do so using a credit registry that is unique in that it allows the researcher to have access to some private information about borrower risk that is unobserved by the lender. The data also includes public information about borrower risk, loan contract terms, and ex post performance for both secured and unsecured loans. The results suggest that the ex post theories of collateral are empirically dominant, although the ex ante theories are also valid for customers with short borrower-lender relationships that are relatively unknown to the lender.

The Effect of Credit Scoring on Small Business Lending in Low- and Moderate-Income Areas

We test the implications of Flannerys (1986) and Diamonds (1991) models concerning the effects of risk and asymmetric information in determining debt maturity, and we examine the overall importance of informational asymmetries in debt maturity choices. We employ data on over 6,000 commercial loans from 53 large U.S. banks. Our results for low-risk firms are consistent with the predictions of both theoretical models, but our findings for high-risk firms conflict with the predictions of Diamonds model and with much of the empirical literature. Our findings also suggest a strong quantitative role for asymmetric information in explaining debt maturity.

The Federal Home Loan Bank System: The Lender of Next-to-Last Resort?

This paper empirically examines the effect of the use of credit scoring by large banking organizations on small business lending in low- and moderate-income (LMI) areas. Using census tract level data for the southeastern United States, the authors estimate that credit scoring increases small business lending by

The Information Revolution and Small Business Lending: The Missing Evidence

16.4 million per LMI area served. Furthermore, this effect is almost 2.5 times larger than that estimated for higher income census tracts (

The 2008 Federal Intervention to Stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

6.8 million). The authors also find that credit scoring increases the probability that a large banking organization will make small business loans in a given census tract. The change in this probability is 3.8 percent for LMI areas and 1.7 percent for higher income areas. These findings suggest that credit scoring reduces asymmetric information problems for borrowers and lenders and that this is particularly important for LMI areas, which lenders may have historically bypassed because of their questionable economic health.