The role of human capital in loan officers' decision policies

• Using a human-capital perspective and the similarity-attraction paradigm, we examine the role of general and specific human capital in the decision policies of 114 Swedish loan officers in their assessments of small-business loan requests. We found that human capital characteristics had marginal impact on decision policy contingencies and that specific human capital had no significant influence on the probability of loan approval. However, we did find that the similarity between the loan officers’ human capital and the pplicants’ human capital was a significant indicator of loan approval. The findings offer interesting insight into the heterogeneity of loan decision processes and outcomes and future research opportunities are suggested.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Företagsekonomi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Business Administration (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Industriell bioteknik -- Annan industriell bioteknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Industrial Biotechnology -- Other Industrial Biotechnology (hsv//eng)

Keyword

bank lending

bank loans

commercial lending

SMEs Swedish SMEs

Swedish banking system

credit risk

credit risk assessment

risk management

credit valuation

decision making credit decision process

credit evaluation process

conjoint experiment

Business studies

Företagsekonomi

Other bioengineering

Övrig bioteknik

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)