Electoral Cycles in Savings Bank Lending

Florian Englmaier and Till Stowasser

No 4402, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We provide evidence that German savings banks – where local politicians are by law involved in their management – systematically adjust lending policies in response to local electoral cycles. The different timing of county elections across states and the existence of a control group of cooperative banks – that are very similar to savings banks but lack their political connectedness – allow for clean identification of causal effects of county elections on savings banks’ lending. These effects are economically meaningful and robust to various specifications. Moreover, politically induced lending increases in incumbent party entrenchment and in the contestedness of upcoming elections.

Keywords: bank lending cycles; political business cycles; political connectedness; public banks; government ownership of firms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D73 G21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp4402.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Electoral Cycles in Savings Bank Lending (2017)
Working Paper: Electoral cycles in savings bank lending (2014)
Working Paper: Electoral cycles in savings bank lending (2013)
Working Paper: Electoral cycles in savings bank lending (2013)
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:ces:ceswps:_4402

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().