When Losses Turn into Loans: The Cost of Weak Banks
研究发现，经济困难时银行为满足资本充足率要求，会扭曲信贷分配，将贷款转向隐瞒损失的问题企业，导致资源错配，解释了葡萄牙2012年约22%的生产率下降。
We provide evidence that banks distort the composition of credit supply in order to comply with ratio-based capital requirements in times of economic distress. An unexpected intervention by the European Banking Authority provides a natural experiment to study how banks respond to falling below minimum required capital ratios during an economic downturn. We show that affected banks respond by cutting lending but also by reallocating credit to distressed firms with underreported loan losses. We develop a method to detect underreported losses using loan-level data. The credit reallocation leads to a reallocation of inputs across firms. We calculate that the resulting increase in input misallocation accounts for about 22 percent of the decline in productivity in Portugal in 2012.