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This paper shows that banks exhibit a weaker (stronger) home bias in the extension of new loans when funding conditions in their home country improve (deteriorate). We refer to these changes in home bias as flight abroad and flight home effects, respectively, and show that they are unrelated to the better known flight to quality effect that arises during periods of market turmoil. Our results also indicate that global banks amplify the effect of homegrown shocks on foreign countries while they are a stabilizing factor for the supply of credit in their home countries.

We develop a simple macroeconomic model of credit market imperfections with heterogeneous investment projects. The projects differ in productivity, the investment requirement, and the severity of agency problems behind the borrowing constraints. A movement in borrower net worth shifts the composition of the credit between projects with different productivity levels, thereby causing endogenous investment-specific technological change. Furthermore, such endogenous technological change in turn affects borrower net worth. These composition effects could give rise to credit traps, credit collapse, leapfrogging, credit cycles, and growth miracles in the dynamics of the aggregate investment and borrower net worth. (JEL E22, E44, O33)

AbstractThis paper tests the existence of political credit cycles, the positive comovement between credit and elections. While several single‐country studies point to the existence of this relationship, the link between electoral cycles and credit expansion has seen little exploration at the multicountry level. Using a comprehensive dataset covering bank and non‐bank credit in 165 countries from 1960 to 2013, we show that both government and private credit significantly increase in election years. This finding suggests the possibility that politicians use not only fiscal and monetary policy to court voters, but also implement credit policies such as interest rate subsidies and tax breaks for debt to enhance credit growth. We also find that a higher degree of financial openness weakens the frequency and magnitude of political credit cycles; yet, the conditional effect of financial openness is stronger for developing countries than developed economies.

"We study models of credit with limited commitment, which implies endogenous borrowing constraints. We show that there are multiple stationary equilibria, as well as nonstationary equilibria, including some that display deterministic cyclic and chaotic dynamics. There are also stochastic (sunspot) equilibria, in which credit conditions change randomly over time, even though fundamentals are deterministic and stationary. We show this can occur when the terms of trade are determined by Walrasian pricing or by Nash bargaining. The results illustrate how it is possible to generate equilibria with credit cycles (crunches, freezes, crises) in theory, and as recently observed in actual economies"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site