Bank relationships and small-business closures during the Finnish recession of the 1990s

Abstract

The paper examines the role of bank relationships in business closures during the Finnish economic crisis of the early 1990s.We utilise a unique panel data set of 474 small and medium-sized firms, for which we have standard accounting information and for which we can in addition identify whether the firm had a lending relationship with the most troubled part of the banking system, namely the Savings Bank of Finland and Skopbank.By estimating a logit model we find that, even accounting for the effects of liquidity, profitability, indebtedness, age and size, firms that had a lending relationship with the savings banks concerned were more likely to close in 1992 than other firms that year or the same firms in other years.Thus being a loan customer of these banks entailed greater risk for firms than having a lending relationship with other intermediaries only in 1992, which was the year the banking sector came to a head.The result lends support to the hypothesis that financial factors affect real outcomes not only through firm and household balance sheets but also through bank behaviour.