The other group of articles is rather empirical in nature and estimate a long-run relationship between the aggregated value of credit and a set of standard macroeconomic factors such as output, prices or interest rates. The main ¯nding of these studies is that for most countries the value of credit tend to increase with GDP and asset prices, and to decrease with the level of interest rates (see Egert et al., 2007 and references therein). While earlier theoretical and empirical studies mostly concentrated on the aggregate level of credit to the private sector or the level of credit supplied to ¯rms, more recent
