Local Bank Financial Constraints and Firm Access to External Finance

III. Data Sources and Variable DefinitionsThe data for this paper is obtained from three sources. First, monthly balance sheets andearnings reports for all the banks in the Argentine financial system between January 1995 andDecember 2001. Each observation in this database consists of fully detailed financial statementsfor bank i at month t. The descriptive statistics of selected variables from the financialstatements are shown in column 1 of Table I. Government owned banks are excluded form thesample. The average bank held $1.1 billion in assets during the sample period. The crosssectional asset distribution is skewed due to the presence of large, foreign owned banks. Localbanks hold above half of the total assets in the banking system and the average local bank has$0.7 billion in assets (column 2 of Table I).The second source of data is the Public Credit Registry database, or CDSF for its acronym inSpanish. Each observation in this database represents a loan or credit commitment j, issued tofirm k by bank i at month t. I will use indicators i, j, k and t consistently along the paper toindicate bank, loans, firm, and months respectively. Both firms and banks have unique tax codeidentifiers that allow constructing a panel dataset, and also linking the CDSF data with the bankfinancial statements. The CDSF contains monthly data on all firms or individuals with morethan $50 of debt with a financial institution in Argentina. For every loan, the database includesdebtor ID number, the issuing bank ID number, the principal outstanding, the amount and typeof collateral posted and a code describing the repayment situation. The repayment situationcode ranges from 1 to 6, where 1 represents a good standing loan and 5 and 6 representdefaulted loans. The categories are precisely defined in terms of the days behind in payment,debt refinancing and bankruptcy filings. 1020