The collateral channel versus the bank lending channel: Evidence from a massive earthquake
利用2011年日本东北大地震对企业有形资产和银行净值的冲击，比较了抵押品渠道和银行贷款渠道对信贷约束及企业销售的影响，发现银行贷款渠道的作用更大且更持久。
This paper compares the economic impact of the collateral and bank lending channels in a unified framework by taking advantage of exogenous shocks to firms’ tangible assets and banks’ net worth caused by the massive Tohoku earthquake in 2011. We obtain the following findings: (1) both damage to a firm's tangible assets and to the net worth of its primary bank lead to an increase in the probability of the firm being credit constrained, which lends support to the existence of both the collateral and the bank lending channel; (2) the increase through the bank lending channel is about twice as large as and longer-lasting than that through the collateral channel; (3) the credit constraint has real effects: in terms of the aggregated sales decline, the impact through the bank lending channel is more than four times as large as that through the collateral channel, because the negative impact of damage to banks’ net worth spilled over to firms located outside the earthquake-damaged region. Overall, the bank lending channel played a far more substantial role than the collateral channel in the wake of the earthquake.