On the Use of Banks Balance Sheet Data in Loan Market Studies: A Note

Due to the unobservability of the new credit production, most of the empirical loan market studies use, instead, the observable credit stock. This substitution has been pointed out to be likely to generate biases (e.g. see Lown and Peristiani (1996)). In this paper, we show that under quite unrestrictive conditions, this substitution does not lead to biased estimates of any log-log model coefficients, as lond as banks panel data is used and fixed effects are included in the estimated equation.