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Banks play an important role in many modern economies. The main functioning of banks is to reduce the information problems between lenders and borrowers. The experiences show that banks with a powerful balance-sheet have a better ability to isolate their lending activities from monetary shocks. So, the balance-sheet items of commercial banks play an important role in their sensitivity to the monetary downturns. This paper has two distinguishing features compared to other papers. First, we examined the indirect effects of monetary policy on bank lending through the balance-sheet items of the Iranian banks. Second, we have used two separate samples private and public banks, because their organizational systems have significant differences. Our hypothesis is that the monetary policy can indirectly affect the public and private banks’ lending through their balance-sheet items. Our results show that the monetary policy has no direct but indirect effects on bank lending in Iran.