Credit Supply Shocks Research Articles

Merchants of Death: The Effect of Credit Supply Shocks on Hospital Outcomes

This study examines the link between credit supply and hospital health outcomes. We use bank stress tests as exogenous shocks to credit access for hospitals that have lending relationships with tested banks. We find that affected hospitals shift their operations to increase resource utilization following a negative credit shock but reduce the quality of their care to patients across a variety of measures, including a significant increase in risk-adjusted readmission and mortality rates. The results indicate that access to credit can affect the quality of health care hospitals deliver, pointing to important spillover effects of credit market frictions on health outcomes. (JEL G21, G32, I11, I18)

Credit Supply or Demand? The Changing Role of Structural Market Forces in Bank Lending*

ABSTRACT Recent crises have shown that disruptions in credit markets can have serious macroeconomic consequences. This paper aims to assess the structural drivers of the bank lending market to non-financial corporations using the structural VAR methodology in a small, open, and bank-based euro area economy – Slovakia. The results show that credit demand shocks (loans demanded by firms) are at least as important as credit supply shocks (loans supplied by banks) in the lending market, and that this importance changes over the cycle. These findings have important policy implications, as responding to these shocks may require different policy measures.

The Real Effects of Credit Supply Shocks: Evidence from an Emerging Economy

AbstractWhat role do credit supply shocks (CSS) play in macroeconomic dynamics in emerging economies? We exploit Russia's setting, including the 2014 Western sanctions, and show that a negative CSS normalized to 0.5 p.p. increase in the lending rate leads to a decrease of 2 p.p. in the output growth rate, 1.5 p.p. in the consumption growth rate and 5 p.p. in the investment growth rate within a quarter. The heterogeneity of the household and firm responses to CSS is driven by debt‐to‐income and leverage ratios, with indebted poorer households and larger firms being more sensitive to fluctuations in credit conditions.

Identifying the transmission channels of credit supply shocks to household debt: Price and non-price effects

Using UK matched microdata, I show that credit supply shocks affect mortgage debt via two channels: one that operates through price conditions in credit markets; and another that operates through non-price credit conditions and affects the quantity of credit supplied by lenders. I find substantial heterogeneity in the different channels by household characteristics. Lower-income households and first-time buyers are especially sensitive to changes in the supply of riskier lending. Home-owners, higher-income households and older borrowers increase debt following shocks to either type of credit conditions, with loosening in mortgage spreads, maximum LTI limits and loan approvals being strongly correlated with their borrowing levels. In aggregate, household leverage responds more strongly to supply shocks that change the quantity of credit, as they affect households across the distribution, both at the intensive and at the extensive margin. But a loosening in price and non-price credit conditions simultaneously or a contraction in multiple price indicators at a time can also fuel rapid credit growth.

Measuring Bank Credit Supply Shocks Using the Senior Loan Officer Survey

Estimating the effects that bank credit supply has on macroeconomic activity has long been an area of active research. A key challenge in pursuing this goal is the ability to measure such shocks to banks' supply of credit separately from shocks to borrowers' demand for credit.

Unpacking the Effects of Bank Credit Supply Shocks on Economic Activity

In this note, we examine the effects of bank credit supply shocks on real economic activity. First, we estimate how GDP and various aggregate demand sectors respond to such shocks. Second, based on the estimated responses, we compute how much those sectors contribute to the overall response of aggregate demand to bank credit supply shocks.

The macroeconomic costs of the bank tax

In this paper, we investigate the real effects of special taxation on banks. We provide evidence that the introduction of a new fiscal levy on banks significantly impairs their performance and has an adverse impact on the real economy through the lending channel. Using micro-level data on lending relationships, we identify the credit supply shock related with a bank tax controlling for loan demand factors. We compute a firm-specific measure of firm exposure to burdened credit institutions. We find a negative impact of the tax shock on investment and output. Our results are important from a policy perspective as they shed light on the economic consequences of double taxation on banks.

Tracing the International Transmission of a Crisis through Multinational Firms

ABSTRACTWe show that multinational firms transmit shocks across countries through their internal capital markets. We study a credit supply shock to parent firms in Germany. International affiliates outside Germany supported their parents through internal lending, became financially constrained themselves, and experienced lower real growth. We find that managers were “Darwinist” with respect to international affiliates but “Socialist” in the home country, that internal capital markets transmitted the credit shock more strongly than a nonfinancial shock, and that access to developed credit markets attenuated the real effects. The total real impact of shock transmission through multinationals on foreign economies was large.

Credit Supply Shocks and Prices: Evidence from Danish Firms

We study the response of firms’ output prices to a cut in credit supply. We combine data on loans between Danish firms and banks with survey-based producer prices and transaction-based export unit values. Exploiting banks’ heterogeneous exposure to the global financial crisis, we show that loans to firms with relationships to exposed banks drop and lending rates increase. In response, firms raise prices by 3–5 percent. This effect is decreasing in the elasticity of firms’ demand but positive for most industrial production. Our results show that firms increase prices to raise cash when external sources of liquidity dry up. (JEL D22, E23, E31, E32, E44, G01, G21)

Max Share Identification of Multiple Shocks: An Application to Uncertainty and Financial Conditions

We generalize the Max Share approach to allow for simultaneous identification of a multiplicity of shocks in a Structural Vector Autoregression. Our machinery therefore overcomes the well-known drawbacks that individually identified shocks (i) tend to be correlated to each other or (ii) can be separated under orthogonalizations with weak economic ground. We show that identification corresponds to solving a nontrivial optimization problem. We provide conditions for non-emptiness of solutions and point-identification, and Bayesian algorithms for estimation and inference. We use the approach to study the effects of uncertainty and financial shocks, allowing for the possibility that the former responds contemporaneously to other shocks, distinguishing macroeconomic from financial uncertainty and credit supply shocks. Using U.S. data we find that financial uncertainty mimics a demand shock, while the interpretation of macro uncertainty is more mixed. Furthermore, variation in uncertainty partially represents the endogenous response of uncertainty to other shocks.

Housing cycle and firm investment: International firm-level evidence

The macro-finance literature provides conflicting views on how movements in housing price affect firms’ capital spending or R&D. We further explore this issue by analyzing a comprehensive international firm-level data set. We use the housing price component independent of firms’ investment opportunities and credit supply shocks. The results support the collateral channel as housing price and firm investment exhibit a positive relationship. This collateral channel is more distinct for capital expenditure than R&D, and in housing downturns when firms’ credit constraints bind. Nevertheless, housing appreciations are negatively associated with R&D and large housing booms are also detrimental to capital investment, which suggests a possible resource reallocation from the production sector to the housing sector during those phases. Small firms and firms with stronger investment opportunities respond more sensitively to housing price. Countries that rely more on bank financing and collateralized lending display a larger collateral effect in capital expenditure.

Trade debts and bank lending in years of crisis

We provide a causal investigation of the substitutability between trade indebtedness and bank loans following credit supply shocks, using a large sample of Italian firms at the time of the sovereign debt crisis. We find a negative and significant elasticity of trade debt to bank loans, consistently with the pecking order theory. This allows firms to rebalance their financial structure, increasing their resilience to external credit shocks. However, the substitutability is found to be much lower or absent for smaller, riskier, highly leveraged firms: weaker firms may not be able to replace bank credit with trade credit when needed.

Firms’ Precautionary Savings and Employment during a Credit Crisis

Can the macroeconomic effects of credit supply shocks be large even when a small share of firms is credit constrained? I use UK firm-level accounting data to discipline a heterogeneous-firm model where the interaction between real and financial frictions induces precautionary cash holdings. In the data, firms increased their cash ratios during the Great Recession, and cash-intensive firms displayed higher employment growth. A tightening of firms’ credit conditions generates the same dynamics in the model. Unconstrained firms preemptively respond to credit supply shocks; this precautionary channel, when appropriately quantified, crucially matters for the aggregate dynamics and firm-level patterns. (JEL D22, E24, E32, E44, G32)

Trade and credit: Revisiting the evidence

AbstractThis paper explores the effects of bank lending shocks on the export behavior of Spanish firms. For that purpose, we combine data on exports at the firm‐product‐destination level with a matched bank‐firm dataset incorporating information on the universe of corporate loans from 2002 to 2013. Armed with this dataset, we identify bank‐year specific credit supply shocks and estimate their impact on firms' exports at the product‐destination level. According to our estimates, credit supply shocks have sizable effects on both the intensive margin (amount exported) and the extensive margin of trade (decision to export).

Do Credit Supply Shocks Affect Employment in Middle-Income Countries?

This paper studies the effect of bank credit supply shocks on formal employment in Mexico using a proprietary dataset containing information on all loans extended to firms by commercial banks during 2010–2015. We find large impacts on the formal employment of small and medium firms: a positive credit shock of 1 standard deviation increases yearly employment by 1.4 percentage points. The shares of uncollateralized credit and credit received by family firms, younger firms, and firms with no previous bank relationships also increase, suggesting that credit shocks may play a more prominent role for employment creation in credit-constrained settings. (JEL D22, G21, G32, J23, L25, M51, O16)

Bank lending to small firms: Metamorphosis of a financing model

We use a novel approach to identifying idiosyncratic credit supply shocks across firm size, relaxing the standard assumption of homogeneous credit supply across borrowers from the same bank. We find that after the 2008–2013 great financial crisis Italian banks have notably tightened their corporate lending policies except for large companies. A significant difference in credit supply has arisen between micro-firms and others; the divide is wider for larger banks and for those with weaker balance sheets. We provide evidence that the shocks that hit the banking system during the crisis translated into a persistent change in credit standards, with an important shift in the supply of new loans from smaller to larger firms. This may reflect the greater difficulties on the part of these financial intermediaries in disbursing loans to firms with a significant degree of informational opacity and with high fixed costs compared with the low unit volume of operations.

Credit supply shocks, home purchase volume, and borrowing behavior

AbstractWe exploit the 2007 private label securitization (PLS) freeze as a quasi‐experiment to study the impact of a negative credit supply shock on home purchases and borrowing behavior. Using a difference‐in‐differences estimator, we show that a negative supply shock to first‐lien mortgages has little impact on the volume of purchases financed with a mortgage, but significantly reduces the average first‐lien loan balance. Much of this reduction in loan balances is the result of increased bunching at the conforming loan limit that is achieved through a combination of greater second mortgage utilization and larger downpayments. Importantly, we find significant heterogeneity in the response to the mortgage supply shock across borrower characteristics and house price levels. Home purchase volume does decline after the shock for less creditworthy borrowers and in expensive locations. The reduction in first‐lien balances is fairly uniform across borrower types, however, the effect is slightly more acute in less expensive areas. Our results suggest that financial market frictions (e.g., downpayment constraints, imperfect credit) play an important role in determining how credit supply shocks impact housing purchases and borrowing behavior.

The Asymmetric Effect of Credit Supply on Firm‐Level Productivity Growth

AbstractWe study the impact of bank credit on firm productivity. We exploit a matched firm‐bank database, covering all the credit relationships of Italian corporations, to measure idiosyncratic supply‐side shocks to credit availability and estimate a production model augmented with financial frictions. We find the effect of credit supply to be asymmetric: contractions harm TFP growth, halting productivity‐enhancing activities; positive credit supply shocks have limited effects. This points toward a role of financial stability in preserving productivity growth.

Specialization in Bank Lending: Evidence from Exporting Firms

ABSTRACTWe develop a novel approach for measuring bank specialization using granular data on borrower activities and apply it to Peruvian exporters and their banks. We find that borrowers seek credit from banks that specialize in their export destinations, both when expanding exports and when exporting to new countries. Firms experiencing country‐specific export demand shocks adjust borrowing disproportionately from specialized banks. Specialized bank credit supply shocks affect exports disproportionately to countries of specialization. Our results demonstrate that firm credit demand is bank‐ and activity‐specific, which reduces banking competition and affects the transmission and amplification of shocks through the banking sector.

Effective risk management in the shadow of COVID-19 pandemic: The evidence of Indonesian listed corporations

The study uses COVID-19 to identify the treatment group as the difference in change of non-financial corporations (NFCs) risk management ratios over time to investigate the causal effect of the NFCs' effective risk management (ERM) practices on operational efficiency (OE). ERM was measured by solvency and liquidity ratios, while the risk management theory was developed to refine the scope of the study. The data were collected from the central bank of Indonesia to map the empirical analysis, and the difference in difference (DID) technique was used to illustrate how NFCs react to mitigate the negative impact of COVID-19 and generate OE. Specifically, a quasi-natural experiment was used to size the effect of ERM practices on corporate OE during the COVID-19 pandemic. The descriptive analysis revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic effect has been unequal across different industrial sectors. Moreover, the empirical findings showed that corporate risk management during COVID-19 is the source of structural change, which affects its existence and operational efficiency. While debt amount and age may affect corporate credit score, ERM practices led the indebted corporation to the flexibility of debt refinancing or/and restructuring, which offers them the ability to prevent bankruptcy and adapt to the changes while operating efficiently. The finding revealed evidence of the important role of long-term debt in offering protection to NFCs during the credit supply shock brought in by the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the findings show that long-term debt is negatively associated with corporate OE. This was expected given that corporations use long-term debt financing for long-term investment, while short-term debt funds the working capital. Thus, to assess the effect of debts on corporate OE, managers should consider their maturity structure, among other factors.