Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society Advance Access originally published online on April 1, 2009
Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 2009 2(2):173-192; doi:10.1093/cjres/rsp006
This article appears in the following Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society issue: Spatial Circuits of Global Finance [View the issue table of contents]
Global banking and local markets: a national perspective
Department of Economics and MoFiR, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Piazzale Martelli 8, Ancona 60121, Italy. p.alessandrini{at}univpm.it, a.presbitero{at}univpm.it and a.zazzaro{at}univpm.it
| Abstract |
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In the early 1990s, a widely shared opinion among scholars and practitioners was that the importance of physical proximity between banks and borrowers would be doomed to decrease drastically over time and, put in extreme terms, the end of banking geography would become a real possibility. However, the empirical evidence shows the continued importance of local credit markets for small borrowers and local economic development. In this paper, we selectively review the literature on the real effects of bank consolidation and produce new evidence on the role of headquarter-to-branch functional distance on relationship lending.
Keywords: global banking, local banking development, functional distance
Received on October 8, 2008. Accepted on February 19, 2009.
JEL Classifications: G21, G34, R12, R51