We find evidence of a bank lending channel for the euro area operating via bank risk. Financial innovation and the new … ways to transfer credit risk have tended to diminish the informational content of standard bank balance-sheet indicators …. We show that bank risk conditions, as perceived by financial market investors, need to be considered, together with the …

address the following questions. How are macroeconomic shocks transmitted to bank risk and other banking variables? What are … the sources of bank heterogeneity, and what explains differences in individual banks’ responses to macroeconomic shocks …? Our paper has two main findings: (i) Average bank risk declines, and average bank lending increases following expansionary …