Communication within Banking Organizations and Small Business Lending
利用新航线开通降低银行总部与分支间的旅行时间，研究内部沟通成本下降如何促进小企业贷款，发现面对面交流能显著增加贷款发放。
Abstract We investigate how communication within banks affects small business lending. Using travel times between a bank’s headquarters and its branches to proxy for the costs of communicating soft information, we exploit shocks to these travel times—the introduction of new airline routes—to evaluate the impact of within-bank communication costs on small business loans. We find that reducing headquarters-branch travel time boosts small business lending in the branch’s county. Several extensions suggest that new airline routes facilitate in-person communications that boost small-firm lending.