The purpose of this study is to investigate the link between bank credit standards (CS hereafter) and business cycle fluctuations. This is the first empirical study which attempts to examine whether business cycle affects bank CS. We use quarterly survey-data on CS taken from the Bank Lending...

We explore the trajectory of bank loan Terms and Conditions over the business cycle, where the latter is decomposed into its long-run (trend) and short-run (cyclical) components. We find that deterioration of each business cycle component leads to a significant tightening of credit terms and...