Our paper “Small firms and domestic bank dependence” with Egor Maslov and Bent Sorensen has been accepted at the Journal of International Economics.
Upshot: After the inception of the euro, the real economy in most member countries remained dependent on credit by domestic banks, which increasingly funded themselves through cross-border interbank funding. We find that this pattern of ‘double-decker’ banking integration exposed domestic banks to sharp declines in cross-border interbank lending during the eurozone crisis. As a result, domestic banks reduced lending which led to large declines in output in sectors with many small (bank-dependent) firms. We propose a quantitative small open economy model to account for these patterns and conclude that a global banking shock leading to a sudden stop in cross-border interbank lending in the eurozone is required to account for them.