We study empirically the effect of growth in real economic activity on the strength of the bank credit channel of monetary policy in the United States using quarterly commercial bank-level panel data between 1986 and 2018, and bank-firm matched administrative data on loan volumes and terms between 2012 and 2018. We find that monetary policy is significantly more effective through the bank credit channel in spurring activity during periods of low economic growth than in cooling the economy when growth is high. Our results also suggest that the channel operates through a broader range of loan categories and banks than previously documented, that it is stronger for business than household lending, and that for some of the major loan categories it only operates in a low economic growth environment.

Government support to banks through the provision of explicit or implicit guarantees affects the willingness of banks to take on risk by reducing market discipline or by increasing charter value. We use an international sample of rated banks and find that government support is associated with more risk taking by banks. More importantly, we find that restricting banks’ range of activities ameliorates the link between government support and bank risk taking. We conclude that, in the presence of moral hazard induced by government support, reducing bank complexity strengthens market discipline.

This paper studies the impact of sovereign debt rating changes on liquidity for stocks from 40 countries for the period 1990–2009. We find that sovereign rating changes significantly affect stock liquidity. The impact is stronger for downgrades than for upgrades, and is nonlinear in event size. The loss of investment grade has a particularly strong negative impact on stock liquidity. We also find that some stock characteristics and country legal and macroeconomic environment are important in explaining the differences in the impact of sovereign credit rating changes on stock liquidity across countries.