The Loan Covenant Channel: How Bank Health Transmits to the Real Economy,
NBER Working Paper No. 23879 We document the importance of covenant violations in transmitting bank health to non-financial firms using a new supervisory data set of bank loans. Roughly one-third of loans in our data breach a covenant during the 2008-09 period, providing lenders the opportunity to force a renegotiation of loan terms or to accelerate repayment of otherwise long-term credit. Lenders in worse health are more likely to force a reduction in the loan commitment following a violation. The reduction in credit to borrowers who violate a covenant accounts for the majority of the cross-sectional variation in credit supply during the 2008-09 crisis. This paper is available as PDF (705 K) or via email
Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w23879 |
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