Using a novel way to identify relationship and transaction banks, we study how banks' lending techniques affect funding to SMEs over the business cycle. For 21 countries we link the lending techniques that banks use in the direct vicinity of firms to these firms' credit constraints at two...

The recent financial crisis has stimulated theoretical and empirical research on the propagation mechanisms underlying business cycles, in particular on the role of financial frictions. Many issues concerning the interactions between banking and monetary policy forced policy makers to rede.ne...