Do banks discriminate sectoral real investment?

Using new sectoral data on Spanish capital stock, real investment and credit we check for the presence of bank preferences for lending to particular branches of the economy. We show that these subsectors share specific characteristics in the levels and components of their cost of use of capital. We find a “preferred habitat” for banks in three sectors: Housing, Real Estate and Construction. Also, commercial banks appear to be more sensitive towards credit demand by nonfinancial firms than savings banks. The latter ones concentrate their lending into the three sectors mentioned above.