Bank ownership and lending patterns during the 2008–2009 financial crisis: Evidence from Latin America and Eastern Europe

This paper examines the impact of bank ownership on credit growth in developing countries before and during the 2008–2009 crisis. Using bank-level data for countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America, we analyze the growth of banks’ total gross loans as well as the growth of corporate, consumer, and residential mortgage loans. While domestic private banks in Eastern Europe and Latin America contracted their loan growth rates during the crisis, there are notable differences in foreign and government-owned bank credit growth across regions. In Eastern Europe, foreign bank total lending fell by more than domestic private bank credit. These results are primarily driven by reductions in corporate loans. Furthermore, government-owned banks in Eastern Europe did not act counter-cyclically. The opposite is true in Latin America, where the growth of government-owned banks’ corporate and consumer loans during the crisis exceeded that of domestic and foreign banks. Contrary to the case of foreign banks in Eastern Europe, those in Latin America did not fuel loan growth prior to the crisis. Also, there are less pronounced and robust differences in the behavior of foreign and domestic banks during the crisis in Latin America.     

Corporate distress and lobbying: Evidence from the Stimulus Act

The literature on distressed firms has focused on these firms’ investment, capital structure, and labor decisions. This paper investigates a novel aspect of firm behavior in distress: how financial health affects a firm?s lobbying and, consequently, its relationship with the government. We exploit the shock to nonfinancial firms during the 2008 financial crisis and the availability of the stimulus package in the first quarter of 2009. We find that firms with weaker financial health, as measured by credit default swap spreads, lobbied more. We also show that the amount spent on lobbying was associated with a greater likelihood of receiving stimulus funds.     

Did the crisis induce credit rationing for French SMEs?

This paper focuses on the access of independent French SMEs to bank lending and analyzes whether the observed evolution of credit to SMEs over the recent period was “demand driven” as a result of the decrease in firms’ activity and investment projects or was “supply driven” with an increase in credit “rationing” stemming from a more cautious behavior of banks. Based on a sample of around 60,000 SMEs, we come to the conclusion that, despite the stronger standards used by banks when granting credit, French SMEs do not appear to have been strongly affected by credit rationing since 2008. This result goes against the common view that SMEs suffered from a strong credit restriction during the crisis but is perfectly in line with the results of several surveys about the access to finance of SMEs recently conducted in France.     

Rescue packages and bank lending

This paper examines whether the rescue measures adopted during the global financial crisis helped to sustain the supply of bank lending. The analysis proposes a setup that allows testing for structural shifts in the bank lending equation, and employs a novel dataset covering large international banks headquartered in 14 major advanced economies for the period 1995–2010. While stronger capitalisation sustains loan growth in normal times, banks during a crisis can turn additional capital into greater lending only once their capitalisation exceeds a critical threshold. This suggests that recapitalisations may not translate into greater credit supply until bank balance sheets are sufficiently strengthened.     

Risk Overhang and Loan Portfolio Decisions: Small Business Loan Supply before and during the Financial Crisis

We estimate a structural model of bank portfolio lending and find that the typical U.S. community bank reduced its business lending during the global financial crisis. The decline in business credit was driven by increased risk overhang effects (consistent with a reduction in the liquidity of assets held on bank balance sheets) and by reduced loan supply elasticities suggestive of credit rationing (consistent with an increase in lender risk aversion). Nevertheless, we identify a group of strategically focused relationship banks that made and maintained higher levels of business loans during the crisis.     

Relationship Lending, Accounting Disclosure, and Credit Availability during the Asian Financial Crisis

We examine whether lending relationships benefit firms by making credit more available during periods of financial stress. Our main finding is that during the Asian financial crisis of July 1997 through the end of 1998, relationship lending increased the likelihood that Korean and Thai firms would obtain credit but it had no effect on Indonesian and Philippine firms. We ask if accounting disclosure might explain the observed differences among the three countries for which audit information is available. We find that for Indonesian firms with weak lending relationships, banks replace relationship lending technology with a financial-statement lending technology. Such a result does not hold for Korean and Philippine firms.     

On the determinants of credit rationing: Firm-level evidence from transition countries

Using survey data for firms from Eastern European transition economies we investigate the determinants of credit rationing. Our rationing definition incorporates firms whose loan application was rejected, but also ‘discouraged’ potential borrowers. We employ a bivariate probit with censoring, approach that accounts for the underlying selectivity since rationed firms are a subset of those without a loan. We include firm-specific attributes related to the alleviation of informational asymmetries, and therefore expected to affect credit rationing. We find that credit rationing depends on firm size, profitability, sales growth, ownership type, legal status, sectoral heterogeneity and the country-specific level of domestic credit.     

Performance and governance in microfinance institutions

We examine the relationship between firm performance and corporate governance in microfinance institutions (MFI) using a self-constructed global dataset on MFIs collected from third-party rating agencies. Using random effects panel data estimations, we study the effects of board and CEO characteristics, firm ownership type, customer-firm relationship, and competition and regulation on an MFI’s financial performance and outreach to poor clients. We find that financial performance improves with local rather than international directors, an internal board auditor, and a female CEO. The number of credit clients increase with CEO/chairman duality. Outreach is lower in the case of lending to individuals than in the case of group lending. We find no difference between non-profit organisations and shareholder firms in financial performance and outreach, and we find that bank regulation has no effect. The results underline the need for an industry specific approach to MFI governance.     

Did the securitization market freeze affect bank lending during the financial crisis? Evidence from a credit register

Using data from the Italian Credit Register we identify the adverse effect of the freeze of the securitization market on bank lending during the crisis of 2007–2008. Applying a differences-in-differences estimation to data on firms that borrow from multiple banks, we single out credit supply by including firm fixed effects. Our results show that the degree to which banks tightened credit supply to nonfinancial firms is positively related to the share of loans they securitized before the crisis. The tightening translated into lower credit growth, higher interest rates, lower probability of accepting loan applications and higher probability of relationship termination. Firms were unable to fully compensate the negative credit supply shock, which suggests that the securitization freeze played a role in reducing aggregate credit availability.     

Differential impact of Korean banking system reforms on bank productivity

We study the impact of banking system reforms during a crisis following a period of undisciplined lending. Regulatory changes aimed at strengthening the banks’ capital structure and risk management practices do not have a uniform impact on bank productivity, but rather favor financially sound or strategically privileged banks. We present evidence documenting the differential impact of regulatory reforms on Korean commercial bank productivity over the period 1995–2005. Average technical efficiency of banks decreased during the financial crisis of 1997–1998. It improved following the subsequent bank restructuring and continued to improve through 2005. The capital adequacy ratio is positively associated with banks’ technical efficiency. The non-performing loans ratio is negatively associated with technical efficiency. Both relationships are accentuated during the crisis but attenuated after the reforms.     

Credit rationing and the relationship between family businesses and banks in Italy

We investigate whether family businesses (FBs) suffer stiffer credit rationing in the post-crisis Italian economy. FBs are, in fact, typically more opaque than other firms, possibly deterring bank lending to them. Moreover, regulatory changes may lead many banks to abandon relationship lending, weakening their ability to evaluate opaque firms. Using detailed firm data, our estimates reach nuanced conclusions. First, credit rationing is not more intense at FBs. However, it systematically intensifies if FBs engage in firm-bank arrangements less able to overcome information asymmetries either coupling with a main bank that uses transactional lending or diluting relationships across various banking partners.     

Bank Heterogeneity and Interest Rate Setting: What Lessons Have We Learned since Lehman Brothers?

A substantial literature has investigated the role of relationship lending in shielding borrowers from idiosyncratic shocks. Much less is known about how lending relationships and bank‐specific characteristics affect the functioning of the credit market in an economy‐wide crisis. We investigate how bank and bank–firm relationship characteristics have influenced interest rate setting since the collapse of Lehman Brothers. We find that interest rate spreads increased by less for those borrowers having closer lending relationships. Furthermore, firms borrowing from banks endowed with large capital and liquidity buffers and from banks engaged mainly in traditional lending were kept more insulated from the financial crisis.     

Do banks price discriminate spatially? Evidence from small business lending in local credit markets

In this paper we explore the effects of bank–borrower physical proximity on price and non-price aspects of small business lending in local credit markets. Along the price dimension, our analysis reveals that interest rates increase with bank–borrower distance and decrease with the distance between borrower and other competing banks. Along the quantity dimension, we observe that more distant borrowers are more likely to experience binding credit limits. We also show that the quantity effects of bank–borrower distance are concentrated among less transparent firms. Our findings are consistent with pricing based on marginal costs that reflect information-based factors, and are in contrast to the established paradigm, where banks adopt spatial discriminatory pricing rules when lending to small-sized enterprises.     

The Impact of House Prices on Consumer Credit: Evidence from an Internet Bank

This paper shows that house price fluctuations can have a significant impact on credit availability. Data from Prosper.com, a peer‐to‐peer lending site that matches borrowers and lenders to provide unsecured consumer loans, indicate that homeowners in states with declining house prices experience higher interest rates, greater credit rationing, and faster delinquency. We find especially large effects for subprime borrowers whose balance sheets are likely most exposed to asset price declines. This evidence suggests that asset price fluctuations can play an important role in determining credit conditions and are thus a potentially significant mechanism for propagating macroeconomic shocks.     

The impact of securitization on credit rationing: Empirical evidence

We study whether banks’ involvement into different types of securitization activity – asset backed securities (ABS) and covered bonds – in Spain influences credit supply before and during the financial crisis. While both ABS and covered bonds were hit by the crisis, the former were hit more severely. Employing a disequilibrium model to identify credit rationing, we find that firms with banks that were more involved in securitization see their credit constraints more relaxed in normal periods. In contrast, only greater covered bonds issuance reduces credit rationing during crisis periods whereas ABS aggravates these firms’ credit rationing in crisis periods. Our results are in line with the theoretical predictions that a securitization instrument that retains risk (covered bond) may induce a more prudent risk behavior of banks than an instrument that provides risk transferring (ABS).     

When arm's length is too far: Relationship banking over the credit cycle

We conduct face-to-face interviews with bank chief executive officers to classify 397 banks across 21 countries as relationship or transaction lenders. We then use the geographic coordinates of these banks’ branches and of 14,100 businesses to analyze how the lending techniques of banks near firms are related to credit constraints at two contrasting points of the credit cycle. We find that while relationship lending is not associated with credit constraints during a credit boom, it alleviates such constraints during a downturn. This positive role of relationship lending is stronger for small and opaque firms and in regions with a more severe economic downturn. Moreover, relationship lending mitigates the impact of a downturn on firm growth and does not constitute evergreening of loans.     

Trade credit and company performance during the 2008 financial crisis

We investigate whether the 2008 financial crisis had an impact on companies’ trade credit, and whether changes in trade credit mitigated the crisis’s impact on firm profitability. We document that the availability of trade credit decreased, and that this decline is more pronounced, the higher the companies’ pre‐crisis reliance on short‐term debt. We further report evidence that the redistribution hypothesis holds during crisis periods. Finally, we show that the crisis had a negative impact on company performance, but that this impact was lower (greater) for firms that report an increase in trade receivables (payables) in crisis compared to pre‐crisis periods.     

Banking Relationships and Syndicated Loans during the 2008 Financial Crisis

The research shows that banking relationships are important to lending. However, few studies focus on the banking relationships in syndicated loans, although these loans have became a major source of financing. The last financial crisis clearly shows the impacts of credit rationing and tightening credit conditions, even in the syndicated loans market. We investigate whether banking relationships help firms to benefit from better terms for syndicated loans in a chaotic financial environment. Using a sample of syndicated loans arranged from 2003 to 2008 in North America and Europe, we find that firms with a previously developed relationship with a lead bank obtained a lower spread and a longer maturity during the financial crisis but did not benefit from larger loan facilities.     

Bank soundness and bank lending to new firms during the global financial crisis

This paper examines how the soundness of financial institutions affected bank lending to new firms during the 2008 financial crisis by using a unique firm–bank match‐level dataset of 1,467 unlisted small and medium‐sized enterprises incorporated in Japan. We employ a within‐firm estimator that can control for unobserved firms’ demand for credit through firm ? time fixed effects. The major findings of this paper are the following four points. First, sounder financial institutions may be generally less likely to provide financing to new firms. Second, our results suggest that sounder financial institutions were less likely to provide loans to new firms during the 2008 financial crisis. Third, financial institutions were less likely to provide financing to new firms during such crisis as compared to those with the same soundness during non‐crisis periods. Finally, such lending relationships to new firms that are established during the financial crisis by sounder financial institutions are more likely to be continued than such lending by less sound financial institutions.     

Financial constraints of private firms and bank lending behavior

We investigate whether and how financial constraints of private firms depend on bank lending behavior. Bank lending behavior, especially its scale, scope and timing, is largely driven by bank business models which differ between privately owned and state-owned banks. Using a unique dataset on private small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) we find that an increase in relative borrowings from local state-owned banks significantly reduces firms’ financial constraints, while there is no such effect for privately owned banks. Improved credit availability and private information production are the main channels that explain our result. We also show that the lending behavior of local state-owned banks can be sustainable because it is less cyclical and neither leads to more risk taking nor underperformance.