Pre-crisis credit standards: monetary policy or the savings glut?

Adrian Penalver

Working papers from Banque de France

Abstract: This paper presents a theoretical model of how banks set their credit standards. It examines how a monopoly bank sets its monitoring intensity in order to manage credit risk when it makes long duration loans to borrowers who have private knowledge of their project's stochastic profitability. In contrast to standard models, it has a recursive structure and a general equilibrium. The bank loan contract considered specifies the interest rate, the monitoring intensity and a profitability covenant. Within this class of contract, the bank chooses the terms which maximise steady-state profits subject to the constraint that it must have as many deposits as loans. The model is then used to consider whether the reduction in credit standards and credit spreads observed before the financial crisis could have been caused by low official interest rates or a positive deposit shock. The model rejects a risk-taking channel of monetary policy and endorses the savings glut hypothesis.

Keywords: credit standards; credit risk; monitoring; risk-taking channel; savings glut. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-cba, nep-dge and nep-mon
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.banque-france.fr/sites/defaul ... g-paper_519_2014.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:bfr:banfra:519

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working papers from Banque de France Banque de France 31 Rue Croix des Petits Champs LABOLOG - 49-1404 75049 PARIS. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael brassart ().