Projects

Bank Branch Closings and Local SME Economic Activity in Slovakia – Good Servant but a Bad Master?

Ing. Mária Širaňová, MA., PhD.

• Basic informations
• Characteristics

• Duration of the project: 05/2021 - 04/2022
  ID number: MeRSA (Membership Research Grant Scheme)

   

• In general, this project aims to investigate how bank branch closings affect economic performance of individual firms in Slovakia. However, we expand the relevant literature in the following ways. Firstly, rather than analysing effect of overall financial development, as generally done, we will specifically focus on bank branch closures and consider them as the treatment endogenously imposed on local firms. With the exception of Nguyen (2018), this is a novelty in the literature. Secondly, we will take into account shape of existing bank branch networks (Tranfaglia, 2018) in order to account for effects of three types of spatial distance (Papi at el., 2015): i) operational, ii) functional, iii) interbank. Lastly, we will focus on change in economic performance of SME segment (productivity) that represents the cornerstone of regional development in Europe and is hypothesised to be mostly affected by the bank branch closures.