Monetary policy transmission may be impaired if banks rebalance their portfolios toward securities. We identify the bank lending and risk-taking channels of monetary policy by exploiting—Italy's unique—credit and security registers. In crisis times, with higher central bank liquidity, less capitalized banks react by increasing securities over credit supply, inducing worse firm-level real effects. However, they buy securities with lower yields and haircuts. Unlike in crisis times, in precrisis times, securities do not crowd out credit supply. The substitution from lending to securities in crisis times helps less capitalized banks repair their balance sheets and restart credit supply with a one-year lag.

We investigate the connections between bank capital regulation and the prevalence of lightly regulated nonbanks (shadow banks) in the U.S. corporate loan market. For identification, we exploit a supervisory credit register of syndicated loans, loan-time fixed effects, and shocks to capital requirements arising from surprise features of the U.S. implementation of Basel III. We find that less-capitalized banks reduce loan retention, particularly among loans with higher capital requirements and at times when capital is scarce, and nonbanks step in. This reallocation is associated with important adverse effects during the 2008 crisis: loans funded by nonbanks with fragile liabilities are less likely to be rolled over and experience greater price volatility.