Interbank Liquidity Crunch and the Firm Credit Crunch: Evidence from the 2007-2009 Crisis The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Citation Iyer, R., J.-L. Peydro, S. da-Rocha-Lopes, and A. Schoar. “Interbank Liquidity Crunch and the Firm Credit Crunch: Evidence from the 2007-2009 Crisis.” Review of Financial Studies 27, no. 1 (January 1, 2014): 347–372. As Published http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/rfs/hht056 Publisher Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies Version Author's final manuscript Citable link http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/87735 Terms of Use Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Detailed Terms http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ INTERBANK LIQUIDITY CRUNCH AND THE FIRM CREDIT CRUNCH: EVIDENCE FROM THE 2007-2009 CRISIS1 Rajkamal Iyer Massachusetts Institute of Technology Samuel Lopes European Central Bank José-Luis Peydró2 Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Barcelona GSE Antoinette Schoar Massachussetts Institute of Technology and NBER April 2013 1 We thank two referees, the Editor and Victoria Ivashina for helpful comments and suggestions. Francesca Rodriguez-Tous provided excellent research assistance. We would also like to thank Nittai Bergman, P.Iyer, Asim Khwaja, Atif Mian and Manju Puri,for their suggestions. Any views expressed are only those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Bank of Portugal, the European Central Bank or the Eurosystem. E-mails: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] (corresponding author), and [email protected]. 2 Corresponding author: José-Luis Peydró. Address: C/ Ramon Trias Fargas 25-27, Office 20.224, 08005, Barcelona (Spain). Phone: (+34) 935421756. E-mail: [email protected] Abstract We study the credit supply effects of the unexpected freeze of the European interbank market, using exhaustive Portuguese loan-level data. We find that banks that rely more on interbank borrowing before the crisis decrease their credit supply more during the crisis. The credit supply reduction is stronger for firms that are smaller, with weaker banking relationships. Small firms cannot compensate the credit crunch with other sources of debt. Furthermore, the impact of illiquidity on the credit crunch is stronger for less solvent banks. Finally, there are no overall positive effects of central bank liquidity, but higher hoarding of liquidity. Keywords: Credit crunch; banking crisis; interbank markets; access to credit; flight to quality; lender of last resort; liquidity hoarding. JEL codes: G01; G21; G28; G32. 2 The developed world has experienced the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression which was at its core a banking crisis. The main channel through which a banking crisis may affect the real economy relates to the ability of the private sector to access the credit needed to fund investment and consumption. Hence, a key question at the heart of the current financial crisis is whether and how the sudden dry up in bank liquidity impacted the availability of credit. A drop in liquidity for some banks may have a direct transmission effect on the supply of credit for firms if firms are unable to substitute with other sources of finance such as loans from other banks, trade credit or other forms of debt. Furthermore, this channel could be especially relevant in the context of smaller younger (entrepreneurial) firms which usually find it difficult to access funds from other sources since they are more opaque and thus mainly rely on existing banking relationships. In this paper we study whether and how banks cut back on lending supply when faced with a negative liquidity shock. What are the margins along which banks adjust their loan portfolios in response to the crisis, e.g. do we observe credit supply contractions across all types of borrowers, or do they disproportionally cut back credit for entrepreneurial (smaller) firms? Could firms substitute funds from alternative sources? In addition, is there a differential effect across different types of banks depending on their solvency? How does public provision of liquidity by the central bank affect the evolution of the shock? One of the main problems in empirically addressing the questions raised above is the difficulty of identifying the causal impact of a bank liquidity shock on loan supply. Liquidity shocks to banks are usually correlated with an underlying change in the overall 3 economic environment, which might adversely affect not only the supply of credit but also the demand for loans from firms and, in general, firm risk. Moreover, even if there is a credit supply reduction from an individual financial institution, it would only translate into credit constraints, if firms cannot substitute a credit reduction from the more affected banks with credit from other, less affected, banks (or even from other sources of credit). To tackle these identification challenges, we use the initial exogenous and unexpected shock to the interbank markets in August 2007. The crisis started in August 2007 in Europe when the interbank market, a crucial source of liquidity for banks in Europe,3 started experiencing significant tensions – for example, interbank loan spreads went significantly up, and the European Central Bank had to inject large amounts of liquidity.4 The onset of this liquidity crisis was an unexpected shock across all European countries and not related to the Portuguese banks, especially as these banks were not investing in US subprime or in the US dollar market. Furthermore, the bank capital regulation in Portugal did not encourage setting up of off-balance sheet vehicles (Acharya and Schnabl 2010) and there was no real estate bubble in Portugal.5 3 See for example Upper (2006). 4 On the 9th of August 2007, the ECB had to inject a significant amount of liquidity to banks (€95 billion) due to a dry up in the interbank markets, and on the following week the ECB injected an additional €150 billion (see e.g. ECB Financial Stability Review 2009, and Cecchetti 2008). 5 Portuguese banks were mainly borrowing from other European banks (BIS 2012) and had net inflows of foreign capital and, therefore, they did not belong to a country with large current account surpluses that need “safe assets” notably from US as e.g. China or Germany (see Acharya and Schnabl 2010). Moreover regulation for Portuguese banks made it unattractive to set-up of off-balance sheet vehicles to arbitrage capital regulation (see also Acharya and Schnabl 2010; Brunnermeier 2009; Covitz, Liang, and Suarez forthcoming). Furthermore, between 1996 and 2006 the accumulated real valuation of housing prices grew only 10% in Portugal as compared to more than 80 percent in the United States, Holland and Greece, 110 percent in Spain, 140 percent in the United Kingdom and 180 percent in Ireland (Nota Temática CDG 2011). 4 We have complete bank balance sheet data, including the interbank borrowing of each of the banks in the system, thus we can observe which banks were more affected by the interbank market tensions. We exploit the interbank liquidity dependence (borrowing) for each bank before the crisis, which gives significant variation in bank liquidity shocks induced by the unexpected European interbank crisis. It is important to note that bank dependence to interbank funds before the crisis (2007:Q2) is not correlated with measures of bank profitability, risk or capital. Moreover, we use an exhaustive dataset from the Portuguese central bank that has detailed loan level data on all corporate loans made by each bank in Portugal, including all the loans made to small and medium size firms. Finally, we have key balance sheet characteristics for the firms, in particular firm size, age, total debt, profitability and interest coverage ratio. We use a difference-in-difference approach comparing lending before and after the crisis among banks with different liquidity shocks (proxied by the interbank borrowing ratio before the onset of the crisis, specifically in May 2007).6 We control for observed and unobserved firm heterogeneity in loan demand, quality and risk by using firm fixed- effects.7 That is, for the same firm, we compare the change in lending by more and less affected banks before (2007:Q2) and after the crisis (2009:Q2). We find that a firm that ex-ante borrows more from banks with a higher interbank borrowing ratio in 2007:Q2 experiences, on average, a greater reduction in credit during the crisis. One could be concerned that this effect is driven by banks with higher 6 There is a large theoretical literature on the bank lending channel. See for example Freixas and Rochet (2008), and Tirole (2006). 7 See Khwaja and Mian (2008). 5 interbank borrowing lending more to firms with lower loan demand or with higher risk during the crisis. However, even when we analyze credit change within a borrower, we find that – for the same firm – the greater decline in credit comes from the bank with a higher ex-ante interbank borrowing ratio. In terms of economic magnitudes we find that a 10% increase in borrowing in the interbank markets prior to the crisis leads to a further 4% reduction in firm credit availability during the crisis. We then examine the heterogeneous effects across firms. Controlling for firm fixed effects, we find that the magnitude of credit supply reduction due to the interbank liquidity exposure is significantly higher economically (and statistically) for firms that are (i) smaller in size (as measured by both total assets or number of employees), (ii) younger (as measured by the age of incorporation), and (iii) with lower banking relationship (as measured by the firm-bank credit volume before the crisis). Interestingly, for the large firms results are not statistically significant anymore – in fact, the coefficient drops to zero.