After the global financial crisis and during the European sovereign debt crisis, bank lending to companies in the euro area slowed down dramatically bringing the economy close to a credit crunch. It was only after the start of the ECB’s quantitative easing programme in early 2015 that bank...

Using a representative sample of businesses in the euro area, we show that Eurosystem purchases of corporate bonds under the Corporate Sector Purchase programme (CSPP) increased the net issuance of debt securities, triggering a shift in bank loan supply in favour of firms that do not have access...