We test whether measures of influence on regulators affect stress-test outcomes. The large trading banks—those most plausibly Too Big to Fail—face the toughest tests. Supervisory stress tests have a greater effect on large trading banks’ portfolios; the large banks respond by making more conservative (initial) capital plans; and, despite their more conservative capital plans, the large banks still fail their tests more frequently than other banks. In contrast, while we find little evidence that political or regulatory connections affect the quantitative element of the stress tests, these connected banks do face less scrutiny under its qualitative dimension

Borrower drawdowns on credit commitments reduce a bank’s capital buffer. Using Austrian credit register data and exploiting the 2008–09 financial crisis as an exogenous shock to bank health, we provide novel evidence that capital-constrained banks manage this risk by cutting credit commitments that are not fully used. Controlling for their capital position, we find that banks also respond to liquidity problems by cutting such commitments. However, banks manage the capital and liquidity risk posed by undrawn credit in a way that limits negative macroeconomic implications: credit cuts are targeted at financially less constrained firms, and we show that borrowers of more-affected banks can substitute lost credit with credit from other banks and do not suffer real effects. Additional findings suggest that voluntary agreements between constrained banks and strong firms to reduce spare borrowing capacity can explain why strong firms experience larger credit cuts

We integrate bank and bond financing into a two-sector neoclassical growth model and identify an automatic stabilization effect due to endogenous bank leverage adjustment. We show that although bank leverage amplifies shocks, the increase of leverage due to a decline in bank equity partially offsets the post crisis decline of bank lending and accelerates economic recovery by reducing the persistence of the bank lending channel. In this case, endogenous leverage adjustment is an automatic stabilizer. Regulatory state-independent capital limits and wage rigidities impair the re-allocation of capital between sectors and weaken this automatic stabilization. A quantitative analysis of the US during the Great Recession shows that the magnitude of automatic stabilization can be significant and informs about potentially high costs of strict capital regulation or wage rigidities during banking crises