Banks can decrease their future capital inadequacy concerns by reducing lending. The
capital crunch theory predicts that lending is particularly sensitive to regulatory capital
constraints during recessions, when regulatory capital declines and external-financing
frictions increase. Regulators and policy makers argue that the current loan loss
provisioning rules magnify this pro-cyclicality. Exploiting variation in the delay in
expected loss recognition under the current incurred loss model, we find that
reductions in lending during recessionary relative to expansionary periods are lower
for banks that delay less. We also find that smaller delays reduce the recessionary
capital crunch effect. These results hold across management quality partitions.