Bank lending standards over the cycle: the role of firms’ productivity and credit risk

Gabriel Jimenez, Enrique Moral-Benito and Raquel Vegas

No 1811, Working Papers from Banco de España

Abstract: We show that bank lending standards are influenced by macroeconomic conditions. We use monthly data from the Banco de España Central Credit Register, which allow us to monitor all loan applications made by non-financial firms to non-current banks from 2002 to 2015. To test the pro-cyclicality of banks’ appetite for risk, we investigate how two firm characteristics (ex-ante credit risk and productivity) interacting with two macroeconomic indicators (business cycle and the monetary policy stance) affect the probability of granting a loan. In order to enhance identification we account for unobserved heterogeneity by means of firm and banktime fixed effects. Our findings indicate that banks soften their credit standards during booms or when monetary policy is loose to harden them during busts or when short-term interest rates increase. This pattern is especially relevant in the case of firms’ productivity, which might partly explain the dismal evolution of aggregate productivity in Spain during the pre-crisis period. Finally, we also find that these results are more pronounced among less capitalized, less liquid and more profitable banks.

Keywords: productivity; credit risk; bank supply; lending standards (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 E51 G21 O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2018-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-eec, nep-eff and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bde.es/f/webbde/SES/Secciones/Publicac ... 18/Files/dt1811e.pdf First version, April 2018 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bde:wpaper:1811

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Banco de España Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ángel Rodríguez. Electronic Dissemination of Information Unit. Research Department. Banco de España (edicionydifusion@bde.es).