Small and medium-sized enterprises are a centrepiece of Europe's economy. Due to their limited size and their generally lower creditworthiness, their access to financial market instruments is more limited than for large enterprises, which benefit from more elaborate Treasury operations,...

This paper examines the sensitivity of non-financial corporate lending to banks' capital ratio and their supervisory capital requirements. We use a unique database for the French banking sector between 2003 and 2011 combining confidential bank-level Bank Lending Survey answers with the...

We measure the impact of bank capital requirements on corporate borrowing and business activity. We use loan-level data and take advantage of the transition from Basel 1 to Basel 2. While under Basel 1 the capital charge was the same for all firms, under Basel 2, it depends in a predictable way...

The paper describes the methods used by the French Banking Supervision Authority (ACP) to run stress tests for the corporate credit portfolio, through credit migration matrices (or transition matrices). This approach is currently used for “top-down” stress tests exercises. Developed for...

The paper describes the methods used by the French Banking Supervision Authority (ACP) to run stress tests for the corporate credit portfolio, through credit migration matrices (or transition matrices). This approach is currently used for “top-down” stress tests exercises. Developed for...

We exploit the Eurosystem’s longer-term refinancing operations (LTROs) of 2011-2012 to analyze the effects that a large provision of central bank liquidity to banks has on the credit supply to firms. We control for credit demand by examining firms that borrow from several banks, in addition to...

We study the real effect on banks’ credit supply after a negative liquidity shock. Controlling for demand effects, we take advantage of the exogenous international interbank market freeze in 2007-2008 to assess the causal relation between French banks’ liquidity risk and their lending. We...

The current financial crisis offers a unique opportunity to investigate the leading properties of market indicators in a stressed environment and their usefulness from a banking supervision perspective. One pool of relevant information that has been little explored in the empirical literature is...