Information acquisition and financial contagion

This paper incorporates costly voluntary acquisition of information à la Nikitin and Smith (2007) [Nikitin, M., Smith, R.T., 2007. Information acquisition, coordination, and fundamentals in a financial crisis. Journal of Banking and Finance, in press, doi:10.1016/j.jbankfin.2007.04.031], in a framework similar to Allen and Gale (2000) [Allen, F., Gale, D., 2000. Financial contagion. Journal of Political Economy 108, 1–33], without relying on any unexpected shock to model contagion. In this framework, contagion and financial crises are the result of information gathering by depositors, weak fundamentals and an incomplete market structure of banks. It also shows how financial systems entering a recession can affect others with apparently stronger economic conditions (contagion). Finally, this is the first paper to investigate the effectiveness of the Contingent Credit Line procedures, introduced by the IMF at the end of the nineties, as a mechanism to prevent the propagation of crises.     

Banks,financial markets,and social welfare

This paper constructs a general equilibrium model of banking and financial markets. The model allows to compare financial systems in which banks have access to financial markets with financial systems in which banks do not have access to financial markets. Allen and Gale [A welfare comparison of intermediaries and financial markets in Germany and the US. European Economic Review 39 (1995) 179–209] find that the Anglo-Saxon model of financial intermediation in which financial markets play a dominant role does not necessarily improve social welfare in comparison with the German model in which banks dominate. Our model provides a theoretical foundation for this view.     

Design and marketing of financial products

Marketing costs are introduced into the security design environmentoutlined in Allen and Gale (1988). It is shown that splittingthe firm's cash flow between products enhances their investorappeal and reduces marketing costs. We also explain how theextremal product design in Allen and Gale is thereby avoidedand how in simple cases, debt, equity, or warrants can be optimal.Furthermore, we illustrate in general terms how the optimalsolution employs portfolios of option-type products, and wegive an example of two optimal products that share profits inseven of eight states.     

On the Optimality of Bank Runs: Comment on Allen and Gale

This paper presents a model consistent with the business cycle view of the origins of banking panics. As in Allen and Gale (1998), bank runs arise endogenously as a consequence of the standard deposit contract in a world with aggregate uncertainty about asset returns. The purpose of the paper is to show that Allen and Gale's result about the optimality of bank runs depends on individuals's preferences. In a more general framework, considered in the present work, a laissez-faire policy can never be optimal, and therefore, regulation is always needed in order to achieve the first best. This result supports the traditional view that bank runs are costly and should be prevented with regulation.     

Market Size, Service Quality, and Competition in Banking

Local banking markets depict enormous variation in population size. Yet this paper finds that the nature of bank competition across markets is strikingly similar. First, markets remain similarly concentrated regardless of size. Second, the number of dominant banks is roughly constant across markets of different size; it is the number of fringe banks that increases with market size. Third, service quality increases in larger markets and is higher for dominant banks. The findings suggest that banks use fixed-cost quality investments to capture the additional demand when market size grows, thereby raising barriers to entry.     

信贷扩张、资产价格上涨与调控政策选择

本文首先从理论上考察信贷与资产价格之间的关系,利用Allen和Gale的资产价格泡沫模型,并根据我国实际情况,通过放松假设条件说明信贷扩张是资产价格上涨的重要原因,资产供给、信贷政策、银行信贷管理能力会影响资产价格的上涨。通过对我国经济的实证研究发现,我国的信贷与资产价格之间存在相关关系,最后指出从资产供给、信贷政策、银行信贷管理等方面入手制定政策抑制资产价格的进一步上涨。     

Characteristics determining the efficiency of foreign banks in Australia

The factors determining foreign bank efficiency are investigated using a three stage research method. It is found that host market incumbency reduces efficiency of foreign banks in Australia, resulting in over use of inputs. Factors underlying the limited global advantage hypothesis of Berger et al. [Berger, Allen N., DeYoung, Robert, Genay, Hesna, Udell, Gregory F., 2000. Globalisation of financial institutions: Evidence from cross-border banking performance. Brookings-Wharton Papers on Financial Service 3, 23–120] are identified, in that nationality specific factors represented by dummy variables are not significant once other relevant effects are controlled for. Parent profitability is not found to result in increased host nation efficiency, while parent credit rating effects are mixed. Some evidence is presented that banks from more financially sophisticated nations are more efficient. The implications of these results are explored from the perspectives of bank management and bank regulators.     

Too many to fail—An analysis of time-inconsistency in bank closure policies

While the too-big-to-fail guarantee is explicitly a part of bank regulation in many countries, this paper shows that bank closure policies also suffer from an implicit “too-many-to-fail” problem: when the number of bank failures is large, the regulator finds it ex-post optimal to bail out some or all failed banks, whereas when the number of bank failures is small, failed banks can be acquired by the surviving banks. This gives banks incentives to herd and increases the risk that many banks may fail together. The ex-post optimal regulation may thus be time-inconsistent or sub-optimal from an ex-ante standpoint. In contrast to the too-big-to-fail problem which mainly affects large banks, we show that the too-many-to-fail problem affects small banks more by giving them stronger incentives to herd.     

Quarter-End Effects in Banks: Preferred Habitat or Window Dressing?

Allen and Saunders [Allen, A., and A. Saunders. “Bank Window Dressing: Theory and Evidence.” Journal of Banking and Finance 16 (1992), 583–623.] document abnormal behavior of bank assets and liabilities at the turn-of-the-quarter and attribute it to window dressing by banks. Using different methods we re-visit bank turn-of-the-quarter balance sheet activity. We also examine quarter-end changes in the effective fed funds rates and fed funds rate standard deviations. We confirm the presence of turn-of-the-quarter activity on bank balance sheets and in the fed funds market. However, we conclude that the turn-of-the-quarter effects are more consistent with customer preferred habitats than window dressing.     

Market Interest Rates and Commercial Bank Profitability: An Empirical Investigation

The widespread notion that commercial banks “borrow short and lend long” implies that sharp market interest rate increases may induce a significant number of banking failures. This paper develops a method for estimating average asset and liability maturities for a sample of large money center banks. Regression models are tested to determine if market rate fluctuations have a significant impact on bank profitability. The conclusion is negative: large banks have effectively hedged themselves against market rate risk by assembling asset and liability portfolios with similar average maturities.     

The liquidity of bank assets and banking stability

This paper shows that an increased liquidity of bank assets, paradoxically, increases banking instability and the externalities associated with banking failures. This is because even though higher asset liquidity directly benefits stability by encouraging banks to reduce the risks on their balance sheets and by facilitating the liquidation of assets in a crisis, it also makes crises less costly for banks. As a result, banks have an incentive to take on an amount of new risk that more than offsets the positive direct impact on stability.     

Dynamic technical and allocative efficiencies in European banking

This paper examines the performance of European banks during the pre-crisis and post-crisis periods, both in terms of technical and allocative efficiencies. We use an innovative Bayesian dynamic frontier model that: (1) distinguishes between short-run and long-run performance; and (2) provides impulse response functions to examine the dynamic effect of shocks in technical and allocative inefficiencies. Based on a rich sample of European banks, we show that while there was a drop in efficiency for most countries following the crisis, the long-run results suggest improvement both in terms of technical and allocative efficiencies. The impulse response functions also show that in the case of shocks in the system, banks seem to revert back to these long-run allocative efficiency scores. We discuss the results in terms of the current financial crisis and provide interesting implications for the European banking industry. We also discuss the determinants of technical and allocative efficiencies. (We would like to thank Professor Allen N. Berger and Professor Andy Mullineux for their valuable comments on the early version of this paper.)     

Do negative interest rates affect bank risk-taking?

We offer early evidence on the impact of negative interest rate policy (NIRP) on banks’ risk-taking. Our primary result shows banks in NIRP-adopter countries reduce holdings of risky assets by around 10 percentage points following implementation of NIRP in comparison to banks in non-adopter countries. We augment this result by identifying NIRP’s impact on other aspects of banks’ risk-taking behaviour; NIRP is associated with reductions in banks’ loan growth and average loan price (by 3.7 percentage points and 59 basis points) and a rebalancing of asset portfolios towards safer assets. Secondly, we find the NIRP-effect is heterogeneous; post-NIRP risk-taking increases at strongly capitalised banks and at banks operating in less competitive markets that exploit market power to insulate net interest margins and profitability. Our robust empirical evidence supports the “de-leverage” hypothesis which suggests that banks acquire safer, liquid assets to bolster their capital positions rather than searching for value by acquiring riskier assets. We base our evidence on a sample of 2,584 banks from 33 OECD countries across 2012 to 2016, and from models that employ a difference-in-differences framework.     

Interest rates and bank risk-taking

A recent line of research views the low interest-rate environment of the early to mid 2000s as an element that triggered increased risk-taking appetite of banks in search for yield. This paper uses approximately 18000 annual observations on euro area banks over the period 2001-2008 and presents strong empirical evidence that low-interest rates indeed increase bank risk-taking substantially. This result is robust across a number of different specifications that account, inter alia, for the potential endogeneity of interest rates and/or the dynamics of bank risk. Notably, among the banks of the large euro area countries this effect is less pronounced for French institutions, which held on average a relatively low level of risk assets. Finally, the distributional effects of interest rates on bank risk-taking due to individual bank characteristics reveal that the impact of interest rates on risk assets is diminished for banks with higher equity capital and is amplified for banks with higher off-balance sheet items.     

Policy Uncertainty and Bank Mortgage Credit

We document that banks reduce the supply of mortgage loans when policy uncertainty increases in their headquarter states as measured by the timing of U.S. gubernatorial elections. The reduction is larger for term-limited elections and close elections. We utilize high-frequency, geographically granular loan-level data to address an identification problem arising from changing local loan demand: (i) we estimate a difference-in-difference specification with state/time or county/time fixed effects; (ii) banks reduce lending outside their home states as well when their home states hold elections; and (iii) we observe important cross-sectional differences in the way banks with different characteristics respond to policy uncertainty.     

银行对企业经营的监督效应研究——基于控股股东掏空行为的视角

从控股股东掏空行为的视角,采用中国上市公司的贷款数据分析中国的商业银行对企业的监督作用。研究发现,银行对控股股东的掏空行为具有一定的监督作用,在银行贷款数量多、贷款期限长的公司中,控股股东的掏空行为明显减少。对不同所有制的企业,银行的监督作用存在异质性。目前,银行的监督作用主要体现在国有银行中,而国有银行能有效监督的对象仅限于地方政府和私人控制的企业,国有银行对中央企业的监督能力较弱。从事后监督来看,银行会对控股股东的掏空行为做出贷款政策的调整,对于控股股东掏空严重的企业,续新贷款的银行数量、续新贷款比例显著下降,而且贷款利率显著提高。     

Financial fragility in the Great Moderation

A nascent literature explores the measurement of financial fragility. This paper considers evidence for rising financial fragility during the 1984–2007 Great Moderation in the U.S. The literature suggests that macroeconomic stability combined with strong growth of credit to asset markets, in asset prices and in credit relative to output are all indicators of rising financial fragility. We show each of these trends in the Great Moderation. We derive the testable implication that in the Great Moderation credit growth is driven more by past credit growth and less by output growth (Allen and Gale, 2000), relative to pre-Great Moderation years. Results from a VAR model estimated on quarterly data for 1955–2007 are consistent with the hypothesis. This invites a reinterpretation of the Great Moderation. Our methodology may help understand when a credit boom turns into a credit bubble, and contributes to the development of methods of measuring financial fragility.     

Concentration of world banking and the role of U.S. banks among the 100 largest, 1956–1980

During the past two decades, international banking activity has grown rapidly. With institutional change of such magnitude taking place, it is interesting and potentially useful to look at the nature of the change. This paper examines two dimensions of this change: the trend in concentration of banking assets in the world's largest banks, and the relative position of banks from various countries among the world's largest banks. The data indicate that the percentage of banking deposits accounted for by the world's largest banks generally has increased steadily since 1956. The data also reveal that the importance of U.S. banks within the world's largest banks has declined dramatically since 1956. It is suggested that this trend is the result of the readjustment to the distortions of WWII, the rise of the commercial paper market in the U.S., and the large number of U.S. banks compared to other countries.     

Optimal central bank transparency

Should central banks increase their degree of transparency any further? We show that there is likely to be an optimal intermediate degree of central bank transparency. Up to this optimum more transparency is desirable: it improves the quality of private sector inflation forecasts. But beyond the optimum people might: (1) start to attach too much weight to the conditionality of their forecasts, and/or (2) get confused by the large and increasing amount of information they receive. This deteriorates the (perceived) quality of private sector inflation forecasts. As a result, inflation is set in a more backward looking manner resulting in higher inflation persistence. By using a large scale panel data set on the transparency of central banks we find empirical support for an optimal intermediate degree of transparency at which inflation persistence is minimized. Our results indicate that while several central banks would benefit from further transparency increases, some already have reached the optimal level.     

Aggregate uncertainty and the supply of credit

This paper presents a model in which a bank can exhibit self-insurance with loan supply contracting when uncertainty increases. This prediction is tested with U.S. commercial banks, where identification is achieved by looking at differential effects according to banks’ capital-to-assets ratio (CAR). Increases in uncertainty reduce the supply of credit, more so for banks with lower levels of CAR. These results are weaker for large banks, and are robust to controlling for monetary policy, to different measures of uncertainty, and to breaking the dataset in subsamples. Quantitatively, the effect of uncertainty shocks on credit supply is about as important as that of monetary policy shocks.