Bank Consolidation and Small Business Lending: The Role of Community Banks

This paper examines how bank consolidation activity affected small business lending in local U.S. banking markets during two 3-year study periods, focussing on the role played by community banks in the process. During the 1994–1997 period, we find that consolidation activity involving big banks is associated with lower loan growth, whereas community bank consolidations and a greater presence of community banks in the market are associated with higher loan growth. During the 1997–2000 period, consolidation activity is either unrelated to small business loan growth or is associated with higher loan growth. In both study periods we find that, net of organization reclassifications due to consolidation or asset growth, the share of small business lending funded by community banks rose, particularly in markets undergoing consolidation.     

Experience matters: The role of academic scientist mobility for industrial innovation

Research Summary: A learning‐by‐hiring approach is used to scrutinize scientists' mobility in relation to the recruiting firms' subsequent innovation output. Our starting point is that among firm hires, individuals with university research experience—hired from universities or firms—can be particularly valuable. However, conflicting institutional logics between academia and industry makes working with academic scientists challenging at times for firms. We suggest two solutions to this difficulty: hiring “ambidextrous” individuals with a mix of experience of university research and working for a technologically advanced firm, and a strong organizational research culture in the recruiting firm reflected by the presence of a scientist on the top management team. We track the mobility of R&D workers empirically using patent and linked employer‐employee data. Managerial Summary: An important way to make organizations more innovative is hiring individual researchers with the right types of skills and experience. We show that individuals with university research experience beyond their final degree are particularly likely to help boost firm‐level innovation output after hiring compared to R&D workers with other types of skills and experience. However, to obtain good returns to innovation from hiring such individuals, firms need a university research–friendly organizational culture when hiring individuals with university research experience, from either firms or academia.     

New class divisions in a modern working life?

This article questions the usefulness of a traditional class divide as a tool for understanding a contemporary working environment among manual and non‐manual workers in the oil service industry. The case of study is an enterprise within a supply chain with asymmetrical relationships between companies. Our findings show that the traditional manual/non‐manual class division is still relevant for understanding differences in perceived work situation in a modern work organisation. However, alongside a cleavage between manual and non‐manual workers, we find a cleavage between workers with differing amounts of contact with employees in organisations higher up in the supply chain.     

Piggy Banks: Financial Intermediaries as a Commitment to Save

Banks and other intermediaries may help savers commit to investment plans that savers could not stick to if they held assets directly. We illustrate this commitment function using a version of the Diamond and Dybvig (1983) model where savers’ short-run liquidity needs are correlated with shocks to investment opportunities. The investment securities are all freely tradeable, yet savers still do better if they delegate their investment decisions to an intermediary that overrides the savers’ liquidity demands when investment opportunities warrant. Bank CDs, insurance annuities, pensions, and even social security, by locking funds out of reach, may all constitute real world examples of this commitment role of financial intermediaries.