While regulatory capital buffers are expected to be drawn to absorb losses and meet credit demand during crises, this paper shows that banks were unwilling to do so during the pandemic. To the contrary, banks engaged in forms of pro-cyclical behaviour to preserve capital ratios. By employing...

We analyse the impact of macroeconomic and monetary policy shocks on corporate credit risk as measured by firms' probabilities of default (PDs) for the four largest euro area countries. We estimate the impact of shocks on one-year PDs using local projections (LP). For the period 2014-19, we find...

In 2001, government guarantees for savings banks in Germany were removed following a law suit. We use this natural experiment to examine the effect of government guarantees on bank risk taking, using a large data set of matched bank/borrower information. The results suggest that banks whose...