The Shift in Bank Credit Allocation : New Data and New Findings

In this paper we present a new data set on bank credit in four categories: home mortgages, consumer credit, bank loans to non-bank financials, and loans to non-financial business, for 74 economies over 1990–2013. We offer a full description of sources and methods of data collection and construction and comparisons with adjacent data sets. We document key trends including the shift in bank credit allocation away from traditional business lending. The literature suggests substantial consequences of this 'debt shift' for growth, income distribution and macroeconomic resilience, which motivated this data construction. A second contribution is to analyze drivers of debt shift in fixed-effects and system-GMM regressions for the full sample and separately for advanced and emerging economies. We find that debt shift is larger in advanced economies with a stronger presence of foreign banks and higher trade. Financial deregulation strongly correlates with debt shift