What drives loan losses in Europe?

Esa Jokivuolle, Jarmo Pesola and Matti Virén

No 6/2014, Bank of Finland Research Discussion Papers from Bank of Finland

Abstract: We model banks' loan losses with a panel of European countries for the period 1982-2012 using three country-specific macro variables: output growth shocks, real interest rates, and a measure of excessive private sector indebtedness. We find that a drop in output has an intensified impact on rising loan losses if the economy is excessively indebted. This may explain differences in loan losses in different recessions across time and across countries. For instance, the dramatic output drop in Finland in 2009 did not cause large loan losses compared with the Finnish crisis of the early 1990s because of the more moderate level of indebtedness. Low interest rates during the recent recession may have been another, perhaps the most important, factor mitigating loan losses.

Keywords: loan losses; banking crises; indebtedness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E44 G28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/212281/1/bof-rdp2014-006.pdf (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:zbw:bofrdp:rdp2014_006

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Bank of Finland Research Discussion Papers from Bank of Finland Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().