Is There a Bank Lending Channel of Monetary Policy in Greece? Evidence from Bank Level Data

This paper analyses empirically the role of bank lending in monetary policy transmission on the basis of Greek bank level data. Two approaches have been taken. One employing a reduced form equation linking monetary policy and distributional variables to bank loans in the spirit of Kashyap and Stein's work. The other, which in general yields more satisfactory results, brings together some of the features of the Bernanke-Blinder model with a method for assessing the impact of differential balance-sheet characteristics on banks' ability to supply loans and investigates directly the behaviour of bank loan supply. A loan supply function was estimated with the use of the bank data, and bank-specific characteristics were found to systematically shift this function