Modelling the "Animal Spirits" of Bank's Lending Behaviour

Carl Chiarella, Corrado Di Guilmi and Tianhao Zhi ()

No 183, Working Paper Series from Finance Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney

Abstract: The idea of “animal spirits” has been widely treated in the literature with particular reference to investment in the productive sector. This paper takes a different view and analyses from a theoretical perspective the role of banks’ collective behaviour in the creation of credit that, ultimately, determines the credit cycle. In particular, we propose a dynamic model to analyse how the transmission of waves of optimism and pessimism in the supply side of the credit market interacts with the business cycle. We adopt the Weidlich-Haag-Lux approach to model the opinion contagion of bankers. We test different assumptions on banks’ behaviour and find that opinion contagion and herding amongst banks play an important role in propagating the credit cycle and destabilizing the real economy. The boom phases trigger banks’ optimism that collectively lead the banks to lend excessively, thus reinforcing the credit bubble. Eventually the bubbles collapse due to an over-accumulation of debt, leading to a restrictive phase in the credit cycle.

Keywords: animal spirits; contagion; pro-cyclical credit cycle; financial fragility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E12 E17 E32 G21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2015-08-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-mac and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.finance.uts.edu.au/research/wpapers/wp183.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.finance.uts.edu.au:80 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)

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:uts:wpaper:183

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Finance Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Duncan Ford ().