Le canal du crédit fonctionne-t-il en Europe ?. Une étude de l'hétérogénéité des comportements d'investissement à partir de données de bilan agrégées

This article studies the impact of monetary policy on the real economy in Europe through one particular transmission mechanism: the credit channel. The credit channel involves the existence of information asymmetries in financial markets and changes agents? financing conditions. According to the credit channel theory, the sensitivity of investment to cash flow should increase following periods of monetary restraint - especially for small firms. To establish the impact of the credit channel on real activity, we test a classical investment model (accelerator-profit) on pseudo-panel data for European countries harmonised by the European Commission (BACH database). The data set contains corporate data aggregated by industry and size for a number of European countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Portugal). Our results show that investment sensitivity to financing conditions is consistent with the credit channel theory and that the impact of monetary shocks in Europe through this channel is a source of asymmetry between countries and between firms of different sizes.