Corporate loans composition in Russia during COVID-19 pandemic
Description
These files contain the description of data that was used in the research paper A. Burova, I. Kozlovtceva, A. Sinyakov "Corporate loans composition in Russia during COVID-19 pandemic: the role of borrowers’ quality and credit lines". We study corporate credit lines utilisation in Russia during the pandemic — a period characterised by significant and sudden shifts in both demand and supply and considerable economic uncertainty. In our analysis, we use detailed granular data from the Russian credit registry, corporate financial statements and information about banks’ loan portfolio. We show that the share of loans provided through credit line utilisation increased during the pandemic. Credit lines thus proved to be an automatic stabiliser for aggregate demand and corporate liquidity. However, the utilisation was more pronounced for firms from less vulnerable industries — those with a-priori lower liquidity needs. Additionally, banks that were more exposed to credit losses tended to have higher shares of credit lines utilised during the crisis. This suggests that borrowers that draw on their credit lines may create a negative externality on new stand-alone borrowers in times of crisis. As banks face tighter capital and lending constraints in a period of economic distress, they will tend to shrink their credit activity, and weaker banks particularly. Thus, borrowers from less exposed sectors tend to create an externality for companies more exposed to a crisis. These results suggest that issuance of credit lines in normal times should be carefully assessed by regulators, considering both its benefits and risks. We use data from several sources: credit registry, banking reports and companies' financial statements. We are not able to provide any of these datasets due to different reasons (the information is either restricted or from paid sources). Thus we provide a set of .do files for STATA that we used to make calculations, estimations and plot graphs for our paper.