We study third-party loan guarantees in a model in which lenders can screen, learn loan quality over time and can sell loans before maturity when in need of liquidity. Loan guarantees improve market liquidity and reduce lending standards, with a positive overall welfare effect. Guarantees...

This paper studies the causal effect of gender bias on access to bank credit. We extract an exogenous measure of gender bias from survey responses by descendants of US immigrants on questions about the role of women in society. We then use data on 6,000 small business firms from 17 countries and...

This paper investigates the effects of interbank rate uncertainty on lending rates to euro area firms. We introduce a novel measure of interbank rate uncertainty, computed as the cross-sectional dispersion in interbank market rates on overnight unsecured loans. Using proprietary bank-level data,...

This paper proposes a tractable way to incorporate lending standards ("credit qualification thresholds") into macro models of financial frictions. Banks can reject borrowers whose risk is above an endogenous threshold at which no lending rate sufficiently compensates banks for the borrowers’...

This paper contributes new evidence on market pricing of rating changes. We examine the relation between spreads and ratings for a very large and comprehensive sample of corporate bonds, which allows us to test for country- and industry-specific effects, as well as to explore the differences...

Applying the identification strategy employed by Driscoll (2004) for the United States, this paper provides empirical evidence for the existence of a bank lending channel of monetary policy transmission in the euro area. In addition, and in contrast to recent findings for the US, we find that in...

We develop a partial adjustment model in order to estimate the factors contributing to banks' internal target capital ratio, lending policy and holding of securities. The model is estimated on a panel of listed euro area banks and country specific macrovariables. Firstly, banks' internal target...

We explore whether the transparency in banks' lending activities enhances the harmonization of credit terms that a bank offers across its different geographic regions. We take advantage of a novel loan-level reporting initiative by the European Central Bank, which requires repo borrowing banks...

Loan loss provisions in the euro area are negatively related to GDP growth, i.e., they are procyclical. Loan loss provisions tend to be more procyclical at larger and better capitalized banks. The procyclicality of loan loss provisions can explain about two-thirds of the variation of bank...

We use a unique dataset of ratings for euro area corporate loans from commercial banks’ internal rating-based (IRBs) systems and central banks’ in-house credit assessment systems (ICASs) to investigate whether banks’ IRB ratings underestimate the credit risk of their corporate loan...