Corporate governance and the insolvency risk of financial institutions

We investigate whether shareholder-friendliness of corporate governance mechanisms is related to the insolvency risk of financial institutions. Using a large sample of U.S. financial institutions over the period 2005–2010, we find that corporate governance is positively related to the insolvency risk of financial institutions as proxied by Merton’s distance to default measure and credit default swap (CDS) spread. We also find that “stronger” corporate governance increases insolvency risk relatively more for larger financial institutions and during the period of the financial crisis. Lastly, our results suggest that shareholder-friendliness of corporate governance mechanisms is viewed unfavorably in the bond market.     

Credit risk securitization and bank soundness in Europe

Using a unique sample of 749 cash and synthetic securitization transactions issued by 60 stock-listed bank holdings in the EU-13 plus Switzerland over the period from 1997 to 2007 this paper provides empirical evidence that credit risk securitization has a negative impact on the issuing banks’ financial soundness. Baseline findings hold even when controlling for likely reverse causality by employing instrumental variable techniques and substituting the accounting-based z-score ratio by market-based indicators of bank risk. Moreover, investigating the relationship between credit risk securitization and single z-score components in order to evaluate significant transmission channels proposed by relevant theoretical literature, we find a negative impact of securitization on bank profitability and capital environment as well as a positive relationship between securitization and the issuing bank's return volatility. Against the background of our empirical results we underline that the decision by the Basel Committee to enhance the new Basel III framework in the field of securitization is a step in the right direction.     

Stress-testing US bank holding companies: A dynamic panel quantile regression approach

We propose an econometric framework for estimating capital shortfalls of bank holding companies (BHCs) under pre-specified macroeconomic scenarios. To capture the nonlinear dynamics of bank losses and revenues during periods of financial stress, we use a fixed effects quantile autoregressive (FE-QAR) model with exogenous macroeconomic covariates, an approach that delivers a superior out-of-sample forecasting performance relative to the standard linear framework. According to the out-of-sample forecasts, the realized net charge-offs during the 2007–09 crisis fall within the multi-step-ahead density forecasts implied by the FE-QAR model, but are frequently outside the density forecasts generated using the corresponding linear model. This difference reflects the fact that the linear specification substantially underestimates loan losses, especially for real estate loan portfolios. Employing the macroeconomic stress scenario used in CCAR 2012, we use the density forecasts generated by the FE-QAR model to simulate capital shortfalls for a panel of large BHCs. For almost all institutions in the sample, the FE-QAR model generates capital shortfalls that are considerably higher than those implied by its linear counterpart, which suggests that our approach has the potential to detect emerging vulnerabilities in the financial system.     

Targeted monetary policy and agriculture business loans

This study examines the effect of a Targeted Easing (TE) policy, an unconventional monetary policy tool initiated by the Chinese central bank to reduce reserve requirement ratios of agricultural financial institutions. Utilizing a longitudinal sample of Chinese agriculture companies and a matching sample of industrial firms between 2012 and 2017, we find that the TE policy successfully achieves its intended policy goal to boost lending to the agriculture sector. Results from our difference-in-differences estimations indicate that loan levels of agriculture firms increases significantly more than that of matching nonagricultural firms under TE relative to the non-TE period. We also document heterogeneous TE effects and find that agricultural firms with smaller agency costs, larger financing constraints, and larger loan intensity levels benefit significantly more from a TE policy than their counterparts. In addition, the TE policy effect is more salient during a contractionary period than in an expansionary period.     

Lending attitude as a financial accelerator in a credit network economy

In existing literature, commercial banks are often considered mere financial intermediaries that facilitate the flow of credit in an imperfect credit market. However, as demonstrated in the history of financial instability, the behavior of financial institutions plays an important role. This paper examines how lenders’ attitudes affect macroeconomic performance. In our analysis, the economy is composed of multiple borrowers (firms) and one lender (bank). Each borrower is directly connected to the lender through its credit contract. At the same time, each borrower is indirectly connected to all the other borrowers within the credit network. Using this model, we execute computer simulations to examine the economic consequences of lending attitudes. The results of the simulations demonstrate that the bank’s lending attitude functions as a financial accelerator; that is, it significantly affects the dynamics of the economic system through the credit network. Consequently, the same level of exogenous shock generates completely different outcomes depending on the different lending attitudes. The results also show that there exists an optimal lending attitude that leads to high economic growth and a stable growth path.     

Sustainable development and financial institutions: Do banks' environmental policies influence customer deposits?

This paper investigates the relationship between the environmental policies taken by financial institutions and the choice of depositors on where to save their money. Prior research has shown that increases in the number of customers making deposits are driven by bank pricing policy and switching costs for depositors. By employing a dynamic panel data model, this study empirically tests how environmental performance influences the depositors' choice on where to put their money in a sample of worldwide financial institutions from 2011 to 2018. The main results suggest that there is a negative relationship between banks' environmental performance and customers' deposits. Furthermore, the banks that are the best at managing carbon emissions and at pursuing sustainable development pay lower interest rates on customer deposits.     

中国现代金融体系的结构、影响及前景

在经济快速增长的背景下,中国已逐步形成一个以中央银行为核心、商业银行为主体,各种银行和非银行金融机构分工协作的现代国家金融体系。运用计量分析方法和典型相关分析,研究中国现代金融体系的社会融资结构、证券市场结构以及影子银行结构,测度国家现代金融体系对实体经济各行业的影响程度。研究表明:金融机构贷款与债券市场对相关行业的促进具有一定协同作用,股票市场对第一、二产业的发展影响较小,金融业对第三产业的促进作用最大。根据目前金融体系的结构、影响,可以预见未来中国现代金融体系的发展前景将主要体现在市场化、网络化以及国际化三个方面。     

The recurrence of financial distress: A survival analysis

Companies often suffer periods of financial distress before filing for bankruptcy. Unlike one-off bankruptcies, financial distress can occur repeatedly within the same individual firm. This paper is focused on the recurrence of financial distress and studies the Chinese stock market, where Special Treatment – an official indicator of financial distress – can be repeatedly applied to a listed company. We employ a stratified hazard model to predict the probability of subsequent distress with variables, including duration dependency, event-based factors, institutional variables, financial ratios, market-based variables and macroeconomic conditions. Our empirical results show that accounting and market-based variables have limited power in predicting the recurrence of distress, whereas the duration of recovery, restructuring events and their interaction terms with the accounting and macroeconomic factors affect the recurrent risk significantly. Tested on out-of-time samples, our proposed hazard models show a robust performance in the prediction of recurrent risk over time.     

Political environment and bank performance: Does bank size matter?

In this study, we investigate the relationship between the political environment and bank performance and whether this relationship is contingent on bank size. We use a sample comprising more than 1600 banks in 58 countries and a set of multidimensional measures collected by the Economist Intelligence Unit to proxy for the political environment. Overall, our findings indicate that political uncertainty is associated with a significant decrease in bank performance. A deeper analysis shows that bank size matters when analyzing the relationship between political risk and bank performance. Precisely, large banks are less vulnerable and more resilient under political distress than other banks. Our findings shed light on the importance of bank size as a determinant of bank performance in countries with high political risk, particularly for investment decision makers. The results are robust to a variety of alternative measurements, and different estimation techniques to deal with endogeneity.     

Does financial regulation affect the profit efficiency and risk of banks? Evidence from China's commercial banks

The goal of financial regulation is to enable banks to improve liquidity and solvency. Stricter regulation may be good for bank stability, but not for bank efficiency. This research aims to examine whether banks have met the CBRC's standard of financial regulations and explores how the previously implemented financial regulations have affected bank efficiency and risk in the past. In addition, we also explored the trade-off relationship between efficiency and risk. Unlike other studies, this study used bank assets as a classification standard from the financial risk and differential regulatory perspective.The empirical results indicate that the CBRC regulates the provision coverage ratio and cost-to-income ratio, which seems relevant to large banks and the loan-to-deposit ratio, capital adequacy ratio, and leverage ratio, which seems relevant to small banks. The CBRC regulates the current ratio to reduce the risks of banks. Based on our empirical results, the current ratio did not affect the risks and led to different efficiency results between large and small banks. In an environment with asymmetric information, a bank decision-making is unobservable. The characteristics of financial regulation provide market clues if a bank is operating at the most efficiency and risk condition.     

企业通过强化财务体制提高融资能力探析

文章从一名在日本多年从事银行融资管理和企业诊断专家的视野出发,以财务会计理论为起点,通过剖析金融机构投资对企业财务报表的分析和看法,发现两者的共同利益点,进而提出了企业想成功获得金融机构的融资,就要改善自身的财务体制,为众多融资困难的中小企业指明了一条有效的融资之路。     

Determinants of Capital Structure: United Kingdom Versus Continental European Countries

In this paper, we analyze how country‐specific differences influence capital structure indirectly through firm‐specific variables. We apply a system Generalized Method of Moments technique to a panel data sample of companies from five countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom) during the period 1998–2008. As the different financial systems of European economies (bank‐oriented or market‐oriented) may influence capital structure differently through firm‐specific variables, we first examine the determinants of capital structure for each country separately and we then analyze whether the observed differences between the United Kingdom and the continental European countries are relevant. The results show that there are substantial differences in the capital structure choices of firms across five major European countries. These differences are motivated by the type of financial systems of the countries (bank‐oriented and market‐oriented) and influence the capital structure indirectly through the firm‐specific variables. Overall, our results support the relevance of the differences in the capital structure choices of firms across five major European countries, and in particular, the singularity of the United Kingdom (a market‐oriented economy) as opposed to continental European countries (bank‐oriented economies).     

Best classification algorithms in peer-to-peer lending

A proper credit scoring technique is vital to the long-term success of all kinds of financial institutions, including peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms. The main contribution of our paper is the robust ranking of 10 different classification techniques based on a real-world P2P lending data set. Our data set comes from the Lending Club covering the 2009–2013 period, which contains 212,252 records and 23 different variables. Unlike other researchers, we use a data sample which contains the final loan resolution for all loans. We built our research using a 5-fold cross-validation method and 6 different classification performance measurements. Our results show that logistic regression, artificial neural networks, and linear discriminant analysis are the three best algorithms based on the Lending Club data. Conversely, we identify k-nearest neighbors and classification and regression tree as the two worst classification methods.     

我国商业银行表外业务发展面临的风险问题探究

随着我国资本市场的逐渐成熟,我国商业银行表外业务也蓬勃发展,呈现一片良好势头,但是,由于表外业务无法体现在银行的财务报表中,缺乏足够的信息透明度,因此表外业务成为了部分银行一定程度上规避监管的一种手段,这使得银行的管理层和监管机构都承担着较大的风险。文中主要通过分析当前一些表外业务在快速迅猛地发展过程中暴露出的问题,又结合与当前的会计准则进行研究,得出银行以及相关信息使用者和投资者应该注意的主要风险问题,并提出相应的一些风险应对措施,希望能给我国商业银行发展表外业务提供理论建议。     

三种Copula-VaR计算方法与传统VaR方法的比较

金融风险测量VaR方法广泛应用于银行等金融机构,Copula技术以其处理非正态联合分布函数所具有的良好性质逐渐成为国内外研究的热点。本文将Copula理论应用于VaR的计算方法,并与传统的VaR方法进行比较,通过美元和欧元组合的实证研究,得到基于Copula的VaR方法能够更加有效地测量风险的结论。     

Network VAR models to measure financial contagion

Financial contagion among countries can arise from different channels, the most important of which are financial markets and bank lending. The paper aims to build an econometric network approach to understand the extent to which contagion spillovers (from one country to another) aris from financial markets, from bank lending, or from both. To achieve this aim we consider a model specification strategy which combines Vector Autoregressive models with network models. The paper contributes to the contagion literature with a model that can consider bank exposures and financial market prices, jointly and not only separately. From an empirical viewpoint, our results show that both bilateral exposures and market prices act as contagion channels in the transmission of shocks arising from a country to other countries.     

加入WTO我国商业银行向混业经营转变的障碍与条件

混业经营巳成为国际金融市场的主流。在我国加入WTO的前提下，我国的金融机构将和实行混业经营或没有法律界定其经营范围的外资金融机构展开激烈竞争。本文对我国商业银行实行混业经营问题进行了分析，提出实行混业经营的障碍因素与基本条件。     

Economies of scale and scope in French banking and savings institutions

In this study, we analyze the costs incurred by French commercial banks and savings institutions. One of the main distinctions between these two types of financial entities concerns management costs, which are higher for commercial bank demand deposits than for the savings institutions' tax-free livret A passbook accounts. Taking this differential into consideration by constructing separate models based on different principles, we find that the average overall and operating costs of the savings institutions are half those of commercial banks. As regards operating costs, small savings institutions enjoy a significant cost advantage over small commercial banks, but this cost advantage is smaller when one compares the performance of large savings institutions to the large banks. The results of our econometric estimates suggest a possible explanation, as we find increasing returns to scale for the banks and diminishing returns for the savings institutions. The value of the returns-to-scope parameter at the mean point appears to indicate a complementarity between certain pairs of outputs. Therefore, ouptut diversification appears to have a positive impact on cost levels for both savings institutions and commercial banks; while institution size, measured by the total assets, has a different impact in these two industries.     

Does institutional quality affect financial inclusion in Africa? A panel data analysis

In this article, we investigate the impact of institutional quality on financial inclusion with a sample of fifty-one African countries. We specify and estimate a dynamic panel data model with the system–generalized method of moments (sys-GMM) over the period 2004–2018, based on different approaches to financial inclusion. Our results show that institutional quality increases financial inclusion as well as the penetration, accessibility, and use of financial services in Africa. These results remain robust to the provision of financial education. Acceleration of income-generating activities in Africa will require improvement in financial institutions.     

Bank competition,financial development and macroeconomic stability: Empirical evidence from emerging economies

In this study, we investigate the potential contribution of bank competition to macroeconomic stability, and the interactive role of financial development. We classify macroeconomic stability into economic and financial stability. Economic stability is represented by the volatility of actual and unexpected output growth, whereas financial stability is assessed by the aggregate Z-score and volatility of the private credit-to-gross domestic product ratio. We employ two structural and two non-structural measures of bank competition in our analysis. Applying a two-step dynamic panel system (GMM) to macroeconomic data from 48 developing nations from 1999 to 2018, we find a bell-shaped relationship between bank competition and macroeconomic stability. The findings imply that a higher level of bank competition promotes macroeconomic stability by reducing output growth volatility, fluctuations in private credit, and the probability of bank default. There is an optimal level of bank competition beyond which it may foster economic and financial instability. Moreover, financial development enhances bank competition’s positive impact on macroeconomic stability.