Since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2007/2008, new lending in the euro area has slowed sharply and the old loans experienced ‘evergreening’, that is, bad loans have been rolled over rather than being liquidated. Even though ameliorating evergreening is key to promote lending for new investment projects and growth, no systematic evergreening measures exist. In this paper, we propose a new cross-country evergreening index and develop a public-choice model to explain why evergreening may reflect the incentives of regulators to forebear. Our evergreening index is based on a survey we designed and was administered by the ifo Institute to about 1000 experts in over 80 countries. We bring the model to the data using a heteroscedastic probit model and find that evergreening is higher in: (i) euro-area countries than in the rest of the world; (ii) in countries facing bank distress; and (iii) is highest in countries which experience banking distress and are members of the euro area. These results are consistent with our theoretical model. (JEL codes: F33, F55 and E58)

中文翻译：

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欧元区的常绿化：来自调查数据和概念框架的证据

自2007/2008年金融危机爆发以来，欧元区的新贷款急剧放缓，旧贷款经历了“常绿”，也就是说，不良贷款已被结转而不是清算。尽管改善常绿是促进新投资项目和增长贷款的关键，但尚无系统的常绿措施。在本文中，我们提出了一种新的越野常绿指标，并建立了一个公共选择模型来解释为何常绿可能反映出监管者前瞻性的动机。我们的常绿指标是根据我们设计并由ifo管理的调查得出的向80多个国家/地区的约1000名专家提供培训。我们使用异方差概率模型将模型引入数据中，发现在以下地区常绿化更高：（i）欧元区国家/地区比世界其他地区高；（ii）在面临银行困境的国家；（iii）在经历银行危机并属于欧元区成员国的国家中最高。这些结果与我们的理论模型是一致的。（JEL代码：F33，F55和E58）