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How Much Do Bank Shocks Affect Investment? Evidence from Matched Bank-Firm Loan Data

Amiti, Mary; Weinstein, David E.

We show that supply side financial shocks have a large impact on firms’ investment. We do this by developing a methodology to separate firm credit shocks from loan supply shocks using a vast sample of matched bank-firm lending data. We decompose loan movements in Japan for the period 1990 to 2010 into bank, firm, industry, and common shocks. The high degree of financial institution concentration means that individual banks are large relative to the size of the economy as in Gabaix (2011). As a result, idiosyncratic bank shocks - i.e. movements in bank loan supply net of borrower characteristics and general credit conditions - can have large impacts on aggregate loan supply and investment. We show that these idiosyncratic bank shocks explain 40 percent of aggregate loan and investment fluctuations.

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Academic Units
Center on Japanese Economy and Business
Publisher
Center on Japanese Economy and Business, Columbia University
Series
Center on Japanese Economy and Business Working Papers, 310
Published Here
January 17, 2013