Alternative Specifications of Bank Lending in France and Germany: Theory, Evidence and Policy Implications

Abstract

In this chapter, I compare a capital budgeting model of bank lending based on stock valuations to a supply/demand model based on an interest rate channel for France and Germany using non-nested hypothesis tests and omitted variables tests. For France, the results of these two statistical tests indicate a strong rejection of the supply/demand model with an interest rate channel and non-rejection of the capital budgeting model. The results for Germany are mixed. For Monetary Financial Institutions, the non-nested hypothesis test and omitted variables test rejected both models. For the banking sector of Monetary Financial Institutions, both tests rejected the supply/demand model but did not reject the capital budgeting model. Do these results have any implications for policy? If volatility in share prices leads to volatility in bank lending which in turn leads to volatility in real economic activity, then governments may want to begin thinking of ways to dampen the volatility in the stock market.