The evolving financial environment facing the corporate sector provides many non-bank external finance options as an alternative to bank finance and this paper examines the relationship between UK firms’ choices over bank versus non-bank finance under different monetary conditions. We look at the external finance 'mix' using a panel of 16,000 UK firm records taken from the FAME database for the...

We study the monetary-transmission mechanism with a data set that includes quarterly observations of every insured U.S. commercial bank from 1976 to 1993. We find that the impact of monetary policy on lending is stronger for banks with less liquid balance sheets—i.e., banks with lower ratios of securities to assets. Moreover, this pattern is largely attributable to the smaller banks, those in t...

We quantify the effects of lending and balance sheet channels on corporate investment during large crises in emerging markets. The depreciated currency creates investment opportunities in the tradable sector but firms might be financially constrained due to: 1) a deterioration of their balance sheet via un-hedged foreign currency debt (balance sheet channel) and 2) a decline in the supply of cr...

In this paper we re–examine banks’ lending behavior taking into account changes in the stance of monetary policy in conjunction with changes in financial sector uncertainty. Using a very large data set covering all banks in the US between 1979–2000, we show that financial sector uncertainty plays an important role in banks’ lending decisions: for a given size classification, less liquid banks (...