Is there a question you want us to ask every credit union and community bank in the United States?
Hello friends,
This summer, my colleagues and I will be working with regional SBDC's to survey the ~4800 credit unions and ~4500 community banks in the United States. We are building a database focused on small business lending which we will make available to researchers upon completion. The database will comprise survey responses about topics including but not limited to: perceptions of local business environments, product offerings, lender preferences (e.g., towards small businesses in certain industries, towards certain types of loans, etc.), and self-assessments (e.g., ranking strengths of the credit union/bank).
The database will be linkable to existing databases, such as that of the Community Bank Research Program, by FDIC code, and we hope it will be particularly useful for researchers interested in topics like the economic geography of entrepreneurship (e.g., spatial analysis, ecosystem research, etc.), lending to minority- or women-owned businesses, or the differential effects of different types of financial capital.
Because we plan on making the database available to researchers, we wanted to provide an opportunity for the community of entrepreneurship scholars to suggest questions they might want us to ask. If there are questions you would like us to ask in the survey, please use this link to submit them to us. We appreciate any input, and we hope the resulting database will be a boon to the community.
Best,
Alex Lewis