Bank Lending in Turkey: Effects of Monetary and Fiscal Policies

We study the impact of monetary and fiscal policies on credit growth in Turkey using bank-level data from the last quarter of 2002 to the first quarter of 2008. We find evidence that the liquidity-constrained banks have a sharper decline in lending during contractionary monetary policies and that the crowding-out effect diminishes more for banks with a retail banking focus when the government adopts fiscal discipline. However, the results are statistically weak. Hence, the evidence is not strong enough to irrefutably document the bank lending channel and the impact of government finances on loan supply in Turkey even though these effects may be operational.