Bank competition, lending relationships and firm default risk: An investigation of Italian SMEs
研究银行市场集中度如何影响中小企业违约风险，发现当企业依赖主要银行且借贷关系紧密时，集中度会显著增加违约风险，且关系持续时间越长影响越大。
Building on the literature relating to bank market structure and on the research analysing costs and benefits of concentrated credit relationships, this article aims to empirically assess whether, and to what extent, local credit market concentration impacts on SME default riskiness – making this impact conditional on the closeness of lending relationships. Controlling for inertia, unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity, we find that bank market concentration positively and significantly affects SME default riskiness when these firms borrow heavily from their main bank and have few credit relationships with other intermediaries. Furthermore, according to our evidence, the influence of credit market concentration on firm default probability is greater as the duration of (close) credit relationships lengthens.