We show that price-cost margins for US banks are consistently countercyclical, even after controlling for credit risk, the term structure of interest rates and monetary policy. This evidence supports the existence of a "financial accelerator" in US banking.

In this paper we study the role of bank capital adequacy requirements in the transmission of aggregate productivity shocks. We identify a gap between the empirical and the theoretical work that studies the “credit crunch” effects of these requirements, and how they can work as a financial...