Laura Blattner
- 14 October 2021
- WORKING PAPER SERIES - No. 2607Details
- Abstract
- We provide evidence that the strength of the bank lending channel varies considerably across three major events in the European sovereign debt crisis - the Greek debt restructuring (PSI), outright monetary transactions (OMT), and quantitative easing (QE). We study how lending responds to each shock using detailed bank, firm, and household data from Portugal, a country that was directly exposed to the three events. While the price of sovereign debt securities increased in all three events, banks reduced sovereign debt holdings and realized accumulated capital gains only after QE. As a result, lending to final borrowers reacted more strongly to QE than to the PSI or OMT events. Our results suggest that asset purchases were more effective than signalling events at stimulating the bank lending channel.
- JEL Code
- E52 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit→Monetary Policy
E58 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit→Central Banks and Their Policies
G18 : Financial Economics→General Financial Markets→Government Policy and Regulation
G21 : Financial Economics→Financial Institutions and Services→Banks, Depository Institutions, Micro Finance Institutions, Mortgages - Network
- ECB Lamfalussy Fellowship Programme
- 28 January 2019
- WORKING PAPER SERIES - No. 2228Details
- Abstract
- We provide evidence that a weak banking sector has contributed to low productivity growth following the European sovereign debt crisis. An unexpected increase in capital requirements for a subset of Portuguese banks in 2011 provides a natural experiment to study the effects of reduced bank capital adequacy on productivity. Affected banks respond not only by cutting back on lending but also by reallocating credit to firms in financial distress with prior underreported loan loss provisioning. We develop a method to detect when banks delay loss reporting using detailed loan-level data. We then show that the credit reallocation leads to a reallocation of production factors across rms. A partial equilibrium exercise suggests that the resulting increase in factor misallocation accounts for 20% of the decline in productivity in Portugal in 2012.
- JEL Code
- G21 : Financial Economics→Financial Institutions and Services→Banks, Depository Institutions, Micro Finance Institutions, Mortgages
G38 : Financial Economics→Corporate Finance and Governance→Government Policy and Regulation
E51 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit→Money Supply, Credit, Money Multipliers
D24 : Microeconomics→Production and Organizations→Production, Cost, Capital, Capital, Total Factor, and Multifactor Productivity, Capacity
O47 : Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth→Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity→Measurement of Economic Growth, Aggregate Productivity, Cross-Country Output Convergence - Network
- ECB Lamfalussy Fellowship Programme