The Wall Street Journal featured research by Hughes, Jagtiani, and Mester on the financial performance of community banks and their small business lending.

A Wall Street Journal article published on June 22, 2016, "Small-Business Lending Doesn't Suffer as Community Banks Grow," focused on research by Joe Hughes and coauthors Julapa Jagtiani and Loretta Mester that examined the financial performance of community banks and their small business lending. The Journal describes a key finding: "As small community banks get bigger, does their small-business lending take a hit? Joseph Hughes of Rutgers University, Julapa Jagtiani of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and Loretta Mester, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, find no such evidence. They find a significant positive relationship between financial performance and the ratio of small-business loans to assets at large community banks, suggesting such banks would have financial incentives to boost their share of small-business loans as they grow." The paper is available at SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2798539.