The bank lending channel of unconventional monetary policy: The impact of the VLTROs on credit supply in Spain

We assess the impact on the credit supply to non-financial corporations of the two very long term refinancing operations (VLTROs) conducted by the Eurosystem in December 2011 and February 2012 for the case of Spain. To do so we use bank–firm level information from a sample of more than one million lending relationships during two years. Our methodology tackles three main identification challenges: (i) how to disentangle credit supply from demand; (ii) the non-random assignment of firms to banks; (iii) the endogeneity of the VLTRO bids, as banks with more deteriorated funding conditions were more likely both to ask for a large amount of funds and to restrain credit supply. Our findings suggest that the VLTROs had a positive moderate-sized effect on the supply of bank credit to firms. We also find that the effect was greater for illiquid banks and that it was driven by credit to SMEs, as there was no impact on loans to large firms. By contrast, strong firm–bank relationships were less sensitive to the positive liquidity shock caused by the VLTROs, which is consistent with the studies that find that relationship lending is a more stable source of credit than transaction lending. Finally, the VLTROs had no impact on either the degree of loan collateralisation or the probability of making loans to new borrowers, while they decreased the probability of renewing old ones, which suggests that those funds were not used for loan “evergreening”.