We study the impact of bank credit on firm productivity. We exploit a matched firm-bank database covering all the credit relationships of Italian corporations, together with a natural experiment, to measure idiosyncratic supply-side shocks to credit availability and to estimate a production model augmented with financial frictions. We find that a contraction in credit supply causes a reduction of firm TFP growth and also harms IT-adoption, innovation, exporting, and adoption of superior management practices, while a credit expansion has limited impact. Quantitatively, the credit contraction between 2007 and 2009 accounts for about a quarter of observed the decline in TFP.

This volume explores the measurement of economic and social progress in our societies, and proposes new frameworks to integrate economic dimensions with other aspects of human well-being. Leading economists analyse the light that the recent crisis has shed on the global economic architecture, and the policies needed to address these systemic risks.

Global banks played a significant role in transmitting the 2007-09 financial crisis to emerging-market (EM) economies. The authors examine adverse liquidity shocks on main developed-country banking systems and their relationships to EM across Europe, Asia, and Latin Amer., isolating loan supply from loan demand effects. Loan supply in EM across Europe, Asia, and Latin Amer. was affected significantly through three separate channels: (1) a contraction in direct, cross-border lending by foreign banks; (2) a contraction in local lending by foreign banks¿ affiliates in EM; and (3) a contraction in loan supply by domestic banks, resulting from the funding shock to their balance sheets induced by the decline in interbank, cross-border lending. Charts and tables.

Using business registry data from China, we show that internal capital markets in business groups can propagate corporate shareholders’ credit supply shocks to their subsidiaries. An average of 16.7% local bank credit growth where corporate shareholders are located would increase subsidiaries investment by 1% of their tangible fixed asset value, which accounts for 71% (7%) of the median (average) investment rate among these firms. We argue that equity exchanges is one channel through which corporate shareholders transmit bank credit supply shocks to the subsidiaries and provide empirical evidence to support the channel.

Recent studies show that uncertainty shocks have quantitatively important effects on the real economy. This paper examines one particular channel at work: the supply of credit. It presents a model in which a bank, even if managed by risk-neutral shareholders and subject to limited liability, can exhibit self-insurance, and thus loan supply contracts when uncertainty increases. This prediction is tested with the universe of U.S. commercial banks over the period 1984-2010. Identification of credit supply is achieved by looking at the differential response of banks according to their level of capitalization. Consistent with the theoretical predictions, increases in uncertainty reduce the supply of credit, more so for banks with lower levels of capitalization. These results are weaker for large banks, and are robust to controlling for the lending and capital channels of monetary policy, to different measures of uncertainty, and to breaking the dataset in subsamples. Quantitatively, uncertainty shocks are almost as important as monetary policy ones with regards to the effects on the supply of credit.