The research project aims at an economic inquiry into the evolution of credit-rules and their influence on systemic risk and economic stability. In the theoretical part we compare top-down and bottom-up approaches of monetary transmission, with emphasis on the credit channel and develop an institutional theory of the evolution of credit-rules. In an empirical survey we analyse and visualize on the one hand available data on investment decisions, credit and debt obligations in Eurozone’s firm-bank networks and link them to macro aggregates. On the other hand we look into the Bank Lending Survey, conducted by the European Central Bank (ECB). Building upon such an empirical fitting with institutional theory, the project finally aims at building an agent-based model capable of describing the process of money-creation and money-destruction via credit along endogenous bottom-up logic.