By Miguel Ampudia, Thorsten Beck, Alexander Popov
The trade-off between stability and growth has long been a subject of policy debate and informs views on the extent to which the supervision of banks should be centralised. This column presents analysis of the ECB’s Single Supervisory Mechanism, using the announcement of the mechanism and its implementation as a quasi-natural experiment. It finds that centralised bank supervision is associated with a decline in lending to firms, which is accompanied by a shift away from intangible investment and towards more cash holdings and higher investment in easily collateralisable physical assets.
Link: Centralised bank supervision and the composition of firm investment