TY - JOUR AU - Adrian, Tobias AU - Colla, Paolo AU - Shin, Hyun Song TI - Which Financial Frictions? Parsing the Evidence from the Financial Crisis of 2007-9 JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 18335 PY - 2012 Y2 - August 2012 DO - 10.3386/w18335 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18335 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18335.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Tobias Adrian Monetary and Capital Market Department IMF 700 19th Street Washington DC 20431 E-Mail: tadrian@imf.org Paolo Colla Department of Finance, room 2-D2-08 Università Bocconi Via Röntgen 1 20136 Milano, Italy E-Mail: paolo.colla@unibocconi.it Hyun Song Shin Bank for International Settlements Centralbahnplatz 2 4051 Basel Switzerland Tel: + 41 61 280 80 80 E-Mail: Hyunsong.shin@bis.org M1 - published as Tobias Adrian, Paolo Colla, Hyun Song Shin. "Which Financial Frictions? Parsing the Evidence from the Financial Crisis of 2007 to 2009," in Daron Acemoglu, Jonathan Parker, and Michael Woodford, editors, "NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2012, Volume 27" University of Chicago Press (2013) M2 - featured in NBER digest on 2012-12-20 M3 - presented at "ISOM", June 15-16, 2012 AB - The financial crisis of 2007-9 has sparked keen interest in models of financial frictions and their impact on macro activity. Most models share the feature that borrowers suffer a contraction in the quantity of credit. However, the evidence suggests that although bank lending to firms declines during the crisis, bond financing actually increases to make up much of the gap. This paper reviews both aggregate and micro level data and highlights the shift in the composition of credit between loans and bonds. Motivated by the evidence, we formulate a model of direct and intermediated credit that captures the key stylized facts. In our model, the impact on real activity comes from the spike in risk premiums, rather than contraction in the total quantity of credit. ER -