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ON THE INFLUENCE OF BANKING RELATIONSHIPS ON FRENCH SMES FAILURE

Small and medium firms are highly dependent on banks to finance their business activities. Thus, banking relationship may be crucial to overcome financial difficulties and to ensure their continuity. Accordingly, this paper investigates the influence of banking relationship on SMEs failure. In particular, four measures that firms can control to build their banking relationships and, that resemble standard variables from the literature on bank/firms relationships are evaluated: the breadth of relationships (number of banks), the relationship length(relationship duration), the relationship proximity (bank-firm distance) and, the relationship form (type of bank). Applying a logistic regression to a unique sample of 4960 French SME firms over the period 2013-2016, we evidence that banking relationships have a significant role on the SMEs likelihood of failure. More precisely, we find that multibank relationships, working with a small bank and relationship length are significantly negative correlated with SMEs failure. The opposite effect appears in bank-firm distance, which increases the SMEs probability of failure. Additionally, a corporate failure prediction model was built based on both financial ratios and banking relationship variables. The performance of this model was compared to a model based solely on financial ratios as predictive indicators. The results indicate that banking relationship variables possess prediction power to failure and enhance the performance of corporate failure models. Consequently, our findings are important from a policy perspective to further comprehend the role that banks play on SMEs failure.