Loan types and the bank lending channel

Using credit-registry data for Spain and Peru, we document that four main types of commercial credit—asset-based loans, cash flow loans, trade finance and leasing—are easily identifiable and represent the bulk of corporate credit. We show that credit growth dynamics and bank lending channels vary across these loan types. The effects of monetary policy propagating through banks’ balance sheets are primarily driven by cash flow loans, whereas asset-based credit is mostly insensitive to these types of effects, consistent with theories on the pledgeability of hard assets.