Do banks with low capital extend excessive credit to weak firms, and does this matter for aggregate efficiency? Using a unique data set that covers almost all bank-firm relationships in Italy in the period 2004-2013, we find that, during the Eurozone financial crisis: (i) Under-capitalized banks...

Insufficient capital buffers of banks have been identified as one main cause for the large systemic effects of the recent financial crisis. Although higher capital is no panacea, it yet features prominently in proposals for regulatory reform. But how do increased capital requirements affect...

This paper presents a micro data approach to the identification of credit crunches. Using a survey among German firms which regularly queries the firms' assessment of the current willingness of banks to extend credit we estimate the probability of a restrictive credit supply policy by time...

We develop a model of rational bubbles based on leverage and the assumption of an imprecisely known maximum market size. In a bubble, traders push the asset price above its fundamental value in a dynamic way, driven by rational expectations about future price developments. At a previously...

In U.S. data 1981–2012, unsecured firm credit moves procyclically and tends to lead GDP, while secured firm credit is acyclical; similarly, shocks to unsecured firm credit explain a far larger fraction of output fluctuations than shocks to secured credit. In this paper we develop a tractable...

This paper examines the effects of Islamic banking on the causal linkages between credit and GDP by comparing two sets of seven emerging countries, the first without Islamic banks, and the second with a dual banking system including both Islamic and conventional banks. Unlike previous studies,...

We develop a sovereign debt model with official and private creditors where default risk depends on both the level and the composition of liabilities. Higher exposure to official lenders improves incentives to repay but carries extra costs, such as reduced ex-post flexibility. The model implies...

Shocks to bank lending, risk-taking and securitization activities that are orthogonal to real economy and monetary policy innovations account for more than 30 percent of U.S. output variation. The dynamic effects, however, depend on the type of shock. Expansionary securitization shocks lead to a...

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...

In view of regional house prices drifting apart, we examine whether regionally differentiated macroprudential policies can address financial stability concerns and moderate house price differences. To this end, we disaggregate both the household sector and the housing stock in a two-region DSGE...