Using a panel of 140 countries covering the period 1996-2018, this paper examines how pandemics influence the lending behavior of banks. We take advantage of a new index developed by Ahir et al. (2020) which measures discussions about pandemics at the country level. The results of the...

This paper examines the effect of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on loan loss provisions (LLP). Using a sample of 6,384 US banks and yearly data from 2009-2019, the findings reveal that in times of higher economic policy uncertainty, banks tend to increase their loan loss provisioning....