【正文】 這幾個月以來，老師不僅在學(xué)業(yè)上給我以精心指導(dǎo)，同時還在思想給我以無微不至的關(guān)懷，在此謹(jǐn)向老師致以誠摯的謝意和崇高的敬意！附　　錄The largescale entry of foreign banks in Central Europe and the Baltic States (CEB), starting in the late 1980s and intensifying in the middle of the 1990s, has resulted in a banking sector of which about 77% is currently owned by foreign banks. Notwithstanding a rapidly expanding empirical literature on foreign banking, little is known about the underlying differences between foreign and domestic banks. Do foreign bank subsidiaries mainly operate as standalone banks – like their domestic counterparts – or do they form an integral part of a multinational bank holding? This paper examines foreign banks’ readiness to lend to small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs). An often heard concern in developing transition countries is that large foreign banks may be less inclined to lend to small local firms, but instead focus on large, multinational clients only. A lack of funds for the SME sector could then hurt the process of economic development. Against this background, empirical evidence is presented that is based on 34 focused interviews with highlevel managers of multinational banks and their affiliates, as well as with representatives of supervisory authorities and central banks. Our results shed additional light on how multinational banks influence the type of credit granted by their CEB subsidiaries. In particular, we wished to know whether – and if so, why – foreign banks changed the amount of credit to SMEs. Due to a lack of microdata, it has thus far been difficult to answer this question for the case of the European transition countries.Especially in a transition context, SME financing is of great importance, as small firms play an important role in the restructuring process by absorbing employees that lose their jobs in privatised, restructured, or bankrupt stateowned enterprises (Kowalski and Janc, 1999). Calvo and Corricelli (1993) and Pawlowska and Mullineux (1999) show that the sharp decline in bank credit to Polish SMEs at the beginning of the transition process has significantly contributed to the strong outputdecline in this country. Vice versa, Carlin and Richthofen (1995) find that the rapid growth of theSME sector, and the availability of sufficient external funding for these firms, has contributed to theintegration of Eastern and Western Germany.More recently, empirical studies have used more differentiated approaches than the aforementioned studies, which were mostly based on static analyses of different types of banks or of banks’ lending before and directly after a merger or acquisition. They show that large and foreign banks may actually lead to more SME credit in the medium term. Berger et al. (1998) show for the US that, while consolidation initially reduces SME financing, the refocusing and restructuring efforts of the acquiring banks fully or partly offset this negative effect later on. Acquiring banks may, for instance, promulgate new lending procedures and technologies to collect and process information. Increasingly, this may enable relatively opaque SMEs – hitherto deprived of foreign bank credit – to receive funding from foreignowned banks (Petersen and Rajan, 2002). Moreover, other incumbent banks react to the reduced supply of SME credit by increasing their own supply. Using data from a large crosscountry survey of enterprises – including transition countries – Clarke et al. (2001) find that foreign bank entry improves financing conditions for enterprises of all sizes, although larger firms benefit more. Unfortunately, given their empirical setup, the authors cannot distinguish between two interpretations of this result: either foreign banks provide credit to both large firms and SMEs, or foreign bank petition for large customers leads domestic banks to move down the market and to increase SME credit.To our knowledge, this is the first study to explore the effect of foreign bank entry on smallbusiness lending in the CEB region. By means of focused interviews, we were able to at least partially circumvent the current lack of data on the CEB customers of foreign banks. Our findings paint a multifaceted, but integrated, picture of how foreign bank entry has influenced SME lending in transition countries. This picture broadly confirms the fragmented results of the empirical literature that stresses the potential for positive mediumterm effects of foreign bank entry on SME finance. Little evidenceis found of foreign banks persistently confining their credit supply to large – multinational or home–country – panies. Although many banks had an initial focus on multinationals and the largestlocal corporations, almost all of them started to gradually lend more to SMEs.The finding that many foreign banks have improved subsidiaries’ lending techniques and have reshaped subsidiaries’ customer focus in line with their own customer orientation, confirms the results of Peek and Rosengren (1998) and Berger et al. (1998). Our results are also consistent with Berger et al. (2001), who find that foreign banks only lend less to SMEs if the parent bank is headquartered on another continent. Clearly, that is not the case for the banks interviewed, or for most of the foreign banks in the CEB region for that matter. Their petitive disadvantage in lending to local SMEs has been relatively limited as they entered from neighbouring countries with strong historical ties. We are also able to go one step further than Clarke et al. (2001) by demonstrating that when foreign banks pete fiercely for the largest corporate customers, they will eventually start to move down the market themselves by granting credit to smaller, more opaque firms as well. The ‘difficult” SME segment is thus not necessarily left to domestic banks. Finally, the results here are in line with the recent conceptual framework of Berger and Udell (2004). These authors stress that changes in a country’s financial institution