Close lending relationships between firms and banks can shield borrowers from shocks on their capital and liquidity conditions during a financial crisis, according to a Bank for International Settlements paper published on Tuesday.

Leonardo Gambacorta and Paolo Emilio Mistrulli, the paper's authors, use data on a large sample of loans from Italian banks to non-financial firms to investigate how bank-specific characteristics, such as size, liquidity, capitalisation, funding structure and the bank