What Do a Million Banks Have to Say About the Transmission of Monetary Policy?

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In an effort to shed new light on the monetary transmission mechanism, we create a panel data set that includes quarterly observations of every insured commercial bank in the United States over the period 1976-1993. Our key cross-sectional finding is that the impact of monetary policy on lending behavior is significantly more pronounced for banks with less liquid balance sheets -- i.e., banks with lower ratios of cash and securities to assets. Moreover, this result is entirely attributable to the smaller banks in our sample, those in the bottom 95% of the size distribution. Among other things, our findings provide strong support for the existence of a lending channel

Published: Kashyap, Anil K. and Jeremy C. Stein. "What Do A Million Observations On Banks Say About The Transmission Of Monetary Policy?," American Economic Review, 2000, v90(3,Jun), 407-428.

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