Home Business & Economics Who Gets the Credit? And Does It Matter? Household vs. Firm Lending Across Countries
Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Who Gets the Credit? And Does It Matter? Household vs. Firm Lending Across Countries

  • Thorsten Beck , Berrak Büyükkarabacak , Felix K. Rioja and Neven T. Valev
Published/Copyright: March 13, 2012

While theory predicts different effects of household credit and enterprise credit on the economy, the empirical literature has mainly used aggregate measures of overall bank lending to the private sector. We construct a new dataset from 45 developed and developing countries, decomposing bank lending into lending to enterprises and lending to households and assess the different effects of these two components on real sector outcomes. We find that: 1) enterprise credit is positively associated with economic growth whereas household credit is not; and 2) enterprise credit is significantly associated with faster reductions in income inequality whereas household credit is not. We also find that the share of household credit is higher in more urban societies, in countries with smaller manufacturing sectors and more market-based financial systems, while market structure and regulatory policies are not related to credit composition.

Published Online: 2012-3-13

©2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Advances Article
  2. Life Cycle Dynamics of Income Uncertainty and Consumption
  3. Immigration, Fiscal Policy, and Welfare in an Aging Population
  4. Contributions Article
  5. Who Gets the Credit? And Does It Matter? Household vs. Firm Lending Across Countries
  6. How Much Did the 2009 Australian Fiscal Stimulus Boost Demand? Evidence from Household-Reported Spending Effects
  7. Economic Growth and Political Survival
  8. Exchange Rate Uncertainty and Trade
  9. Monetary and Macroprudential Policy Rules in a Model with House Price Booms
  10. A Unified Framework for Using Micro-Data to Compare Dynamic Time-Dependent Price-Setting Models
  11. Government Policy Response to War-Expenditure Shocks
  12. Poverty Traps and Growth in a Model of Endogenous Time Preference
  13. Where Has All the Money Gone? Foreign Aid and the Composition of Government Spending
  14. Great Spending Crashes
  15. Capital Utilization and the Amplification Mechanism
  16. Topics Article
  17. Unemployment Expectations and the Business Cycle
  18. Sector-Specific Capital, Labor Market Distortions and Cross-Country Income Differences: A Two-Sector General Equilibrium Approach
  19. A Dynamic Theory of Competence, Loyalty and Stability in Dictatorships
  20. Coordination Failure in Investment, Economic Growth, and Volatility
  21. Openness, Imported Commodities and the Sacrifice Ratio
  22. Consumption, Leisure and Borrowing Constraints
  23. A Credibility Proxy: Tracking US Monetary Developments
  24. Estimating Information Rigidity Using Firms' Survey Data
  25. Has the Fed Reacted Asymmetrically to Stock Prices?
  26. News Shocks, Productivity and the U.S. Investment Boom-Bust Cycle
  27. A Supply-Demand Framework for Understanding the U.S. Gender Gap in Education
  28. Misallocation and Manufacturing TFP in Bolivia during the Market Liberalization Period
  29. Government Debt Dynamics Under Discretion
  30. The Global Transmission of Government Debt
  31. Is Discretionary Fiscal Policy in Japan Effective?
  32. The Laffer Curve in a Frictional Labor Market
  33. Nonexponential Discounting: A Direct Test And Perhaps A New Puzzle
  34. International Transmission of Medium-Term Technology Cycles: Evidence from Spain as a Recipient Country
  35. Phases of Economic Development: Do Initial Endowments Matter?
Downloaded on 8.12.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/1935-1690.2262/html
Scroll to top button