The impact of non-performing loans on bank lending in Europe: An empirical analysis

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, considerable attention has been paid to the accumulation of non-performing loans in the balance sheet of European banks and to its potential negative effects on bank lending to the real economy. Using a dataset composed of bank-specific information and country aggregates, we study the impact of the stock and the flow of non-performing loans on the lending activities of a sample of 75 European banks between 2014 and 2018. In general, higher rates of non-performing loans, together with other variables, are associated with lower growth rates of performing loans. This effect persists across several econometric specifications and is more significant for those banks exhibiting lower growth rates of performing loans. Similarly, our econometric analysis suggests that banks with higher decreases in their rate of non-performing loans tend to lend more to the real economy, an effect which is particularly intense at the right tail of the distribution. The findings of our paper can be useful for policymakers when addressing the resolution of non-performing loans in banks.