Lower capital requirements as a policy tool to support credit to SMEs :Evidence from a policy experiment

We investigate empirically whether this reduction has supported SME financing and to which extent it is consistent with SME credit risk. Economic capital computations based on multifactor models do confirm that capital requirements should be lower for SMEs. Taking into account the uncertainty surrounding their estimates and adopting a conservative approach, we show that the SF is consistent with the difference in economic capital between SMEs and large corporates. As for the impact on credit distribution, our differences-in-differences specification enables us to find a positive and significant impact of the SF on the credit supply.