Critics claim that capital requirements can exacerbate credit cycles by restricting lending in an economic downturn. The introduction of Basel 2, in particular, has led to concerns that risksensitive capital charges are highly correlated with the business cycle. The Basel Committee is...

The massive decline in international trade in 2008/09 is often attributed to the global deterioration in financial conditions after the bankruptcy of a US investment bank, Lehman Brothers. This paper examines the association between external finance and firm activity in Germany in more detail....

We take a structural approach to assessing the empirical importance of shocks to the supply of bank-intermediated credit in affecting macroeconomic fluctuations. First, we develop a theoretical model to show how credit supply shocks can be transmitted into disruptions in the production economy....

This paper estimates the exporter premium in bank lending. We examine credit relationships in Germany, covering all loans of more than 1.5 million euro over the period from 2005 to 2010. Having controlled for a wide range of other firm and bank characteristics, our results indicate that...

Using panel data of 68,800 small and large firms, I examine whether firms are subject to shifts in the supply of credit over the business cycle. Shifts in the supply of credit are identified by exploring how firms substitute between commitment credit - lines of credit - and non-commitment...

Does the mere presence of big banks affect macroeconomic outcomes? Gabaix (2011) shows that idosyncratic shocks can have aggregate effects if the distribution of firm sizes in manufacturing follows a power law distribution. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we expand the theory of granularity...

This paper analyzes the recent boom-bust cycle in the US housing market from a regional perspective. Particular attention is paid to supply side restrictions and financial accelerator effects related to subprime lending. Considering 248 Metropolitan Statistical Areas across the entire US, we...

We show that credit supply shocks have a strong impact on firm-level as well as aggregate investment by applying the methodology developed by Amiti and Weinstein (2013) to a rich dataset of matched bank-firm loans in the Portuguese economy for the period 2005 to 2013. We argue that their...

Using different credit measures, this study identifies the credit booms in Turkey that have occurred after December 2002, and examines their determinants. We find that the primary factors that have a strong correlation with the probability of a credit boom are the changes in the slope of the...

Banking crises are rare events that break out in the midst of credit intensive booms and bring about particularly deep and long-lasting recessions. This paper attempts to explain these phenomena within a textbook DSGE model that features a non-trivial banking sector. In the model, banks are...