tailieunhanh - Integrating with their Feet: Cross-Border Lending at the German-Austrian Border

The empirical literature on this issue is so far very limited. One notable exception is the paper by Klüh and Stella (2008). The authors of this paper found a relatively stable and robust negative relationship between central bank financial strength and inflation, but at the same time suggested that only a relatively strong impairment of the central bank’s balance sheet would result in a significant worsening of inflation performance. Another recent contribution is Adler et al. (2012), which suggests that central bank financial strength can be a statistically significant factor explaining large negative interest rate deviations from a forward-looking Taylor. | Integrating with their Feet Cross-Border Lending at the German-Austrian Border Jarko Fidrmuc Christa Hainz CESifo Working Paper No. 2279 Category 10 Empirical and Theoretical Methods April 2008 presented at CESifo Conference on Financial Market regulation in Europe January 2008 Support by the WGL Leibniz Association within the project how to construct Europe An electronic version of the paper may be downloaded from the SSRN website from the RePEc website from the CESifo website wp CESifo Working Paper No. 2279 Integrating with their Feet Cross-Border Lending at the German-Austrian Border Abstract The financial integration in Europe concentrates on cross-border mergers rather than crossborder lending and emphasizes the need for harmonizing bank regulation and supervision. We study the impact of cross-border lending in a theoretical model where banks acquire either hard or soft information of borrowing firms. We test the model s predictions using the ifo business climate survey that reports the perceptions of German firms credit availability between 2003 and 2006. Our results show that distance matters for cross-border lending especially for the SMEs. In contrast to the policy of harmonization differences in bank regulations may have speeded up the cross-border lending. JEL Code G18 G21 C25. Keywords financial integration SMEs banking supervision business surveys threshold analysis. Jarko Fidrmuc Department of Economics and Geschwister-Scholl-Institute for Political Science University of Munich Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 80539 Munich Germany Christa Hainz Department of Economics University of Munich Akademiestrasse 1 III 80799 Munich Germany April 2008 The authors would like to thank Hannah Hempell André Kunkel Stefan Mittnik Karen Pence Monika Schnitzer John Wald Frank Westermann and seminar participants at the ifo Conference on Survey Data in .