Bank lending in Germany and the UK: are there differences between a bank‐based and a market‐based country?

We estimate Markov switching vector autoregressive systems for loans to firms and loans to households to investigate their relationship to interest rates and investment and consumption, respectively. We find evidence for different reactions of lending to shocks in real variables and interest rates across regimes both within countries and across countries for a given regime. We find evidence for a procyclical effect of lending during specific growth periods in both countries.