Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/222282 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Publisher: 
ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Kiel, Hamburg
Abstract: 
This paper identifies and quantifies –for the first time– the relative importance of borrower (credit demand) versus bank (supply) balance-sheet channels. We submit fictitious applications (varying households’ characteristics) to the major Italian online-mortgage platform. In this way we ensure that all banks receive exactly the same mortgage applications, and that –for each application– there are other identical ones except for one borrower-level characteristic. We find that: (i) Borrower and bank channels are equally strong in causing (and explaining) loan acceptance (each channel changes acceptance by 50 p.p. for the interquartile range and explains 29% of R-square). (ii) Differently, for pricing, borrower factors are much stronger. (iii) Banks supplying less credit accept riskier borrowers. Finally –exploiting administrative credit register data– we document borrower-lender assortative matching: safer banks have more credit relations with safer firms. Moreover, the measure of credit supply estimated in the experiment (differently from a very similar measure estimated from the observational mortgage data) determines bank credit supply to firms and risk-taking in administrative data.
Subjects: 
credit demand
credit supply
bank lending channel
household balance sheet channel
mortgages
SMEs
risk-taking
JEL: 
G21
G51
E51
C93
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.