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This article describes the bank lending survey that the Czech National Bank has been using since 2012 to gather valuable qualitative information about the bank credit market as a complement to statistical reporting. The article sets out to conduct a quantitative assessment of the survey results and to determine the roles played in new credit developments in 2012-2016 by changes in credit supply and changes in demand for loans as reported by banks in the survey. The results of the analysis indicate that although some of banks' survey responses are statistically significant in explaining the amounts of new loans reported by banks, the survey's ability to explain credit growth is currently limited. Growth in new loans for house purchase can be attributed primarily to growth in demand driven by falling interest rates. According to the results, supply and demand factors both played a role in the case of loans to non-financial corporations. For consumer credit and other lending to households, the results of the analysis are ambiguous.

This paper investigates the risk channel of monetary policy on the asset side of banks' balance sheets. We use a factoraugmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) model to show that aggregate lending standards of U.S. banks, such as their collateral requirements for firms, are significantly loosened in response to an unexpected decrease in the Federal Funds rate. Based on this evidence, we reformulate the costly state verification (CSV) contract to allow for an active financial intermediary, embed it in a New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model, and show that - consistent with our empirical findings - an expansionary monetary policy shock implies a temporary increase in bank lending relative to borrower collateral. In the model, this is accompanied by a higher default rate of borrowers.

We study the existence and economic significance of bank lending channels that affect employment in U.S. manufacturing industries. In particular, we address the question of how a dramatic worsening of firm and consumer access to bank credit, such as the one observed over the Great Recession, translates into job losses in these industries. To identify these channels, we rely on differences in the degree of external finance dependence and of asset tangibility across manufacturing industries and in the sensitivity of these industries' output to changes in the supply of consumer credit. We show that household access to bank loans matters more for employment than firm access to local bank loans. Our results suggest that, over the recent financial crisis, tightening access to commercial and industrial loans and consumer installment loans explains jointly about a quarter of the drop in employment in the manufacturing sector. In addition, a decrease in the availability of home equity loans explains an extra one-tenth of the drop.

Do tightenings of bank lending standards permanently reduce bank lending? We construct a measure of a bank's level of lending standards using micro-data from the sample of banks participating in the Eurosystem Bank Lending Survey in The Netherlands and show that this level measure affects business lending. The level effect is statistically robust and economically relevant; a one point tightening reduces a bank's quarterly growth rate of business lending by about half a percentage point until bank lending standards are eased. This level effect of bank lending standards helps to explain low bank lending growth after a period of prolonged tightening as well as high bank lending growth in a period of prolonged easing. As such, the analysis provides another potential indicator for macroprudential policy.

We study the relationship between bank lending standards, loan growth and the business cycle in the euro area and the US within a vector error correciton model using Bayesian estimation methods. To deal with the short data series available for the euro area, we exploit information from the estimated US system to improve the estimation of the euro area system. We find that tighter bank lending standards are associated with lower loan growth as well as lower output growth in both areas. Differences in reactions appear in the strength and the persistence of responses.

If firms borrow working capital to finance production, then nominal interest rates have a direct influence on inflation dynamics, which appears to be the case empirically. However, interest rates may only partly mirror the cost of working capital. In this paper we explore the role of bank lending standards as a potential additional cost source and evaluate their empirical importance in explaining inflation dynamics in the US and in the euro area.