Soft Information and Government Loan Approval

This paper explored how soft information and hard information were used when SBC(Small Business Corporation, Korea) reviewed government loan applications. The data set is made up of financial and non-financial data of small-business firms since 2004. A non-financial data set is considered as soft information. Relative importance of three kinds information such as credit information, soft information, financial information is compared with each other by using the logit model. As a result, credit information is most critical to the loan approval, and then soft information follows, lastly financial information has the smallest effect on the loan approval. This is because the credit information is made up of the non-linear combination of soft information and financial information. When the relative importance of soft information and financial information is considered, soft information is relatively more critical to the loan approval then financial information. This is because financial ratios provided by small-business firms are not reliable enough.