1. Introduction
Beginning in the 1980s, bank failures increased dramatically and the growth rate of bank lending underwent a striking decline. From 1985 through 1992, commercial bank failures averaged over 160 per year, a rate unseen since the Great Depression, while aggregate commercial and industrial (C&I) lending by banks decreased from $577.3 billion to $536.4 billion. The increased failure rate renewed interest in failure prediction models, in how failure rates affect bank structure, and in the impact of failure resolution costs on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insurance fund and taxpayers.1 The dramatic decline in bank lending rates prompted research on possible causes, which included the 1990-1991 recession, the implementation of the Basle risk-based capital standards, the impact of increased loan losses on capital, increasingly stringent bank examinations, and increased competitiveness in the banking industry.2
This paper explores the question of whether the increase in bank failures affected business loan growth. This issue has potentially important implications for credit availability and economic activity. Recent evidence suggests that a significant percentage of businesses, particularly small businesses, have no direct access to financial markets and, as a result, are almost completely dependent on commercial banks for credit.3 In addition, if the credit view of monetary policy is correct, a decrease in business lending affects real economic activity. More generally, this paper relates to the literature on the mutual value of banking relationships and the uniqueness of bank loans.4
This paper contributes to the literature by simultaneously examining failed bank acquisitions, bank capital, and business lending. Most important, the paper offers at least a partial explanation for the observed declines in bank business lending: the acquisition of failed bank assets by healthy institutions. Although a significant amount of research examines failures and lending individually, few studies have investigated the relationship between the acquisition of failed banks and the lending activity of the acquiring bank. Second, following previous research, this paper examines the role of bank capital on the lending process.5 Third, a unique FDIC receivership data set is employed, which includes the actual amount of assumed assets rather than estimates from the Call Report, thereby permitting a more rigorous analysis of the possible impact of bank failures on lending.6 Finally, a two-stage least squares (2SLS) fixed-effects model is used to recognize the endogeneity of both bank lending and capital and model the different channels through which the acquisition of failed bank assets can infueince lending. As such, the paper expands on the previous literature (Shrieves and Dahl, 1995) that analyzed the simultaneity of bank lending and capital.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides a brief literature review on the relationship between bank capital and lending. Section 3 describes the resolution processes used by the FDIC to resolve bank failures and how they relate to bank lending. Section 4 develops an econometric model to examine the impact of acquiring failed bank assets, while section 5 describes the data and presents the empirical results. Finally, section 6 provides concluding remarks.