Public Guarantees and Private Banks’ Incentives: Evidence from the COVID-19 Crisis

This paper shows that private incentives influence the allocation of public guaranteed lending (PGL), resulting in weaker banks shifting riskier corporate loans’ risk to taxpayers. We exploit data from the Banco de España’s Central Credit Register during the COVID-19 shock in Spain, and a stylized model is used to structure the empirical results. Unlike non-PGL, banks provide more PGL to riskier firms accounting for a higher share of their total lending to firms before the crisis. Importantly, the effects are stronger for weaker banks. Results using firm (bank) fixed effects and loan volume/price information suggest a supply-driven mechanism. Exploiting exogenous variations across similar firms with different access to PGL, we show that PGL increases banks’ lending to riskier firms, both overall and as a share of their total lending, especially for weaker banks.