RUI: Community Bank and Credit Union Effects on Communities and Local Economies in the US during the Great Recession

Marc SchneibergSES-1528190里德学院这项研究考察了社区银行和信用社如何帮助社区和当地经济度过大衰退。在过去的三十年里，美国银行业抛弃了传统的根基和做法。在摆脱监管监督的过程中，它将资产集中在少数几家大型、全国性或全球性的银行集团，并从“枯燥的银行业务”(吸收存款、发放和持有贷款)转向以市场为基础的银行业务，涉及衍生品交易以及新金融工具的创造和销售。随着这些变化，银行和地方经济之间的脱节越来越严重，金融体系内的债务和风险异常上升，为危机埋下了伏笔。然而，社区银行和信用社继续在美国经济中发挥重要作用，为消费者、小企业和工薪家庭提供了近1.4万家当地拥有和运营的小型银行，甚至是合作组织的银行。这些机构在衍生品和证券交易中的参与度较低。他们与自己的社区保持着密切的联系，在内部仍然致力于并有组织地为客户和这些社区服务，而不仅仅是追求股东价值，而且与当地经济的联系与花旗或摩根大通等银行不同。这项研究将利用1994年至2013年美国经济的新数据，分析社区银行和信用合作社对社区、地方经济的影响，以及它们维持就业、活跃的小企业部门、新企业的形成和复苏的能力。通过这些分析，本研究将对不同类型的银行和金融组织如何在面对危机时影响社区韧性和当地经济表现提供新的知识。它还将确定改革的新途径，包括用支持规模较小、更以地方社区为基础和更具合作性的金融机构的政策来补充对“大到不能倒”银行的传统监管。这项研究将开发和测试关于社区银行和信用社对美国地方经济内部四个关键结果的影响的假设：新的企业形成、小企业部门的规模和份额变化、收入不平等以及大衰退期间失业率的飙升和复苏。这项研究将挖掘经济社会学和金融社会学，以寻找关于金融的社会结构如何影响银行实践和地方经济的假说，利用关于金融的两个关键维度的理论。它将侧重于：1)银行的组织结构，形成这样一种见解，即当地拥有并经营或合作拥有的小型银行不太可能在追求股东价值的过程中抛弃其社区和客户；以及2)银行与客户之间的交换关系类型，形成这样一种看法，即从事关系型放贷做法并与借款人保持密切、持续或根深蒂固的联系的银行与主要依赖抽象风险评级和保持一定距离的交易性银行做法的银行与客户和当地经济的关系将截然不同。然后，这项研究将通过对1994至2013年间当地经济的银行、组织和经济结构的年度、县和大都市统计地区层面数据的时间序列分析来检验这些假设。这些分析的结果将推动对金融的社会学研究，超越其对货币中心银行、货币和衍生品市场的交易室以及银行与客户之间的二元关系的关注，以定量和更广泛地记录关系银行和银行的组织结构如何影响当地经济。研究结果还将通过追踪金融的社会结构以及银行和社区之间的联系，加深经济和城市社会学之间的联系，从而形成社区在面对危机时的韧性。

Marc SchneibergSES-1528190Reed CollegeThis study examines how community banks and credit unions helped communities and local economies weather the Great Recession. Over the past three decades, American banking abandoned its traditional roots and practices. As it shed regulatory oversight, it concentrated assets in a handful of giant, national or global banking corporations, and shifted away from "boring banking" practices (taking deposits and making and holding loans) toward market-based banking involving derivatives trading and the creation and sale of new financial instruments. With these changes came a growing disconnect between banks and local economies, and an extraordinary run up in debt and risk within the financial system, setting the stage for crisis. Yet community banks and credit unions continued to play vital roles in the US economy, providing consumers, small business and working families with access to nearly 14,000 smaller, locally owned and operated, and even cooperatively organized banks. These institutions participated less, if at all, in derivatives and securities trading. They sustained close ties to their communities, and remained committed and organized internally to serving clients and those communities rather than just pursuing shareholder value, and related to local economies differently from banks like CITI or JP Morgan Chase. Using new data on the American economy from 1994 to 2013, this study will analyze the effects of community banks and credit unions on communities, local economies, and their capacities to sustain employment, vibrant small business sectors, new business formation, and recovery. Through these analyses, this study will contribute new knowledge about how different kinds of banking and the organization of finance affect community resilience and local economic performance in the face of crises. It will also identify new avenues for reform, including supplementing traditional regulation of "too-big-to-fail" banks with policies that support smaller, more local community based and cooperative financial institutions. This study will develop and test hypotheses about the effects of community banks and credit unions on four key outcomes within local economies in the United States: new business formations, the size and changes in the share of the small business sector, income inequality, and the spike and recovery in unemployment through the Great Recession. The study will mine economic sociology and the sociology of finance for hypotheses about how the social structure of finance affects banking practices and local economies, exploiting theory about two key dimensions of finance. It will focus on: 1) the organizational structure of banks, developing the insight that small, locally owned and operated or cooperatively owned banks are less likely to abandon their communities and clients in the pursuit of shareholder value; and 2) the type of the exchange relations between banks and clients, developing the insight that banks that engage in relational lending practices and sustain close, ongoing or embedded ties with borrowers will relate quite differently to clients and local economies than banks that rely mainly on abstract risk rating and arm's length, transactional bank practices. The study will then test these hypotheses using time series analyses of annual, county- and Metropolitan Statistical Areas-level data on the banking, organizational, and economic structure of local economies from 1994 through 2013. The results of these analyses will advance sociological research on finance by going beyond its focus on money-center banks, trading rooms in currency and derivatives markets, and the dyadic relations between banks and clients to document quantitatively and more broadly how relational banking and the organizational structure of banks affect local economies. The results will also deepen links between economic and urban sociology by tracing how social structures of finance and ties between banks and communities shape community resilience in the face of crisis.