Justifiable Thrift or Feverish Animal Spirits: What Stirred the Corporate Credit Crunch in Poland?

This paper concerns the problem of corporate credit in Poland and tries to determine the sources of banks’ unexpected hesitance to provide enterprises with additional liquidity, which was observed during the global financial crisis. It differentiates between fundamental and non-fundamental determinants, which – when combined – reconstruct the course of events that led to the slowdown. A special attention is devoted to variables believed to be behavioral and theoretically inconsistent with the conventional belief of how lending activities are coordinated. A structural vector autoregression (SVAR) is run and impulse response functions are produced to provide a numerical support for the developed theoretical framework