Soft information and the geography of SME bank lending
研究了银行对中小企业贷款的地理分布，发现大型复杂机构更擅长处理硬信息而非软信息，支持建立地理分散的金融体系以平衡贷款分布。
This paper explores the geography of bank lending to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and tests the argument that large institutions with complex organizational structures are better able to filter ‘hard’ information than ‘soft’ information. Mortgage lending is used as a control to illustrate the case of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ information. Using data on individual bank lending to SMEs and mortgages by postcode area in Great Britain for the period 2013(2)–2014(4), the paper explains the spatial dispersion of SME lending in the UK in terms of geographical distance and supports the policy of establishing a geographically decentralized financial system as a counterbalance.