Bank resilience to systemic shocks and the stability of banking systems: Small is beautiful

Utilising a novel empirical approach and an extensive sample of listed European banks, we identify which bank characteristics offer a shelter from systemic shocks and compare the relative effects of several hypothetical prudential rules on a bank’s risk exposure. While the results show that restrictions on a bank’s leverage ratio and the imposition of liquidity requirements, as in the Basel III Accord, may improve the resilience of a bank to systemic events, they also demonstrate that bank size, the share of non-interest income and asset growth (none of which are at the centre of the new regulatory landscape) are key determinants of a bank’s risk exposure. In particular, the introduction of a cap on bank absolute size appears the most effective tool, ceteris paribus, to reduce the default risk of a bank given systemic events. Furthermore, in spite of the integration process of the financial industry in Europe, the analysis presented here shows that such a cap should be country-specific with smaller economies requiring smaller banks. Finally, we show that the strengthening of individual bank stability obtained via size restrictions is accompanied by a reduction of the contribution to systemic risk for banks which are relatively large compared to the domestic economy.     

Economic value,competition and financial distress in the European banking system

In this paper we examine the impact of a large number of factors at the bank level (liquidity and credit risks, asset size, income diversification and market power), at the industry level (banking concentration) and macro-level (real GDP growth) on bank financial distress using an unbalanced panel of 308 European commercial banks between 1996 and 2009. The observations falling below a given threshold of the empirical distribution of the Shareholder Value Ratio proxy bank financial distress. We employ a panel probit regression and, given the presence of overlapping data giving rise to residual autocorrelation, we use the Bertschek and Lechner (1998) robust estimator of the covariance matrix of parameters. We show that credit risk, liquidity risk and bank market power are the most influential determinants of distressed Shareholder Value Ratio. Finally we evaluate the model out-sample forecasting performance over the 2008–2009 crisis period.     

Contagion risk in the Australian banking and property sectors

The Australian banking system emerged from the global crisis virtually unhurt, with most banks still profitable, adequately capitalized, and with AA credit ratings. Are there any risks or vulnerabilities in this success story? This paper analyzes Australia’s systemic banking risk and attempts to determine if this risk increased with the recent global crisis and whether this risk is related to the downturn experienced in the real estate market. We use extreme value theory to measure banks’ and property firms’ univariate Value at Risk, as well as multivariate intra-sector and inter-sector contagion risks. Of the 13 sectors analyzed, we find that the property sector exhibits the highest level of extremal dependence with the banking sector. The credit crisis significantly increased the probability of a bank or property firm crashing. Moreover, contagion risks significantly increased not only within the banking and property sectors, but also between those sectors.     

The determinants of bank margins in European banking

Most of the theoretical and empirical literature on bank margins has dealt solely with interest margins. Applying the seminal Ho–Saunders model (JFQA, 1981) to a multi-output framework, we show that the relationship between bank margins and market power varies significantly across bank specializations. In this context, European banks are a better laboratory than US banks, since they have generally enjoyed a more flexible regulatory environment in which to provide a wider range of services. Using accounting margins and New Empirical Industrial Organization margins, we find that market power increases as output becomes more diversified towards non-traditional activities in European banking.     

Short-term wholesale funding and systemic risk: A global CoVaR approach

We use the CoVaR approach to identify the main factors behind systemic risk in a set of large international banks. We find that short-term wholesale funding is a key determinant in triggering systemic risk episodes. In contrast, we find weaker evidence that either size or leverage contributes to systemic risk within the class of large international banks. We also show that asymmetries based on the sign of bank returns play an important role in capturing the sensitivity of system-wide risk to individual bank returns. Since short-term wholesale funding emerges as the most relevant systemic factor, our results support the Basel Committee’s proposal to introduce a net stable funding ratio, penalizing excessive exposure to liquidity risk.     

Drivers of systemic risk: Do national and European perspectives differ?

With the establishment of the Banking Union, the European Central Bank has been granted the power to impose stricter regulations than the national regulator if systemic risks are not adequately addressed at the national level. We ask whether there is a cross-border externality in the sense that a bank’s systemic risk differs when applying a national versus a European perspective. On average, banks’ contribution to systemic risk is similar at the two regional levels, and so is the ranking of banks. Generally, larger banks and banks with a lower share of loans are more systemically important. The effects of these variables are qualitatively but not quantitatively similar at the national versus the European level.     

Examining the Relationships between Capital,Risk and Efficiency in European Banking

This paper analyses the relationship between capital, risk and efficiency for a large sample of European banks between 1992 and 2000. In contrast to the established US evidence we do not find a positive relationship between inefficiency and bank risk‐taking. Inefficient European banks appear to hold more capital and take on less risk. Empirical evidence is found showing the positive relationship between risk on the level of capital (and liquidity), possibly indicating regulators' preference for capital as a mean of restricting risk‐taking activities. We also find evidence that the financial strength of the corporate sector has a positive influence in reducing bank risk‐taking and capital levels. There are no major differences in the relationships between capital, risk and efficiency for commercial and savings banks although there are for co‐operative banks. In the case of co‐operative banks we do find that capital levels are inversely related to risks and we find that inefficient banks hold lower levels of capital. Some of these relationships also vary depending on whether banks are among the most or least efficient operators.     

The impact of European bank mergers on bidder default risk

We analyze the implications of European bank consolidation on the default risk of acquiring banks. For a sample of 134 bidding banks, we employ the Merton distance to default model to show that, on average, bank mergers are risk neutral. However, for relatively safe banks, mergers generate a significant increase in default risk. This result is particularly pronounced for cross-border and activity-diversifying deals as well as for deals completed under weak bank regulatory regimes. Also, large deals, which pose organizational and procedural hurdles, experience a merger-related increase in default risk. Our results cast doubt on the ability of bank merger activity to exert a risk-reducing and stabilizing effect on the European banking industry.     

Can We Prove a Bank Guilty of Creating Systemic Risk? A Minority Report

Because increasing a bank's capital requirement to improve the stability of the financial system imposes costs upon the bank, a regulator should ideally be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that banks classified as systemically risky really do create systemic risk before subjecting them to this capital punishment. Evaluating the performance of two leading systemic risk models, we show that estimation error alone prevents the reliable identification of the most systemically risky banks. We conclude that it will be a considerable challenge to develop a riskometer that is sound and reliable enough to provide an adequate foundation for macroprudential policy.     

基于共同冲击和异质风险叠加传导的风险传染研究——来自中国上市银行网络的传染模拟

本文将银行系统遭遇外部共同冲击作为研究起点,建立了一个共同冲击和异质风险交互传导与放大的简化模型,冲击的传导包括“原始冲击”、“增量冲击”和“违约冲击”三个风险传染阶段。基于2018年我国15家上市银行的股票收益率和年报数据、2006年至2018年的银行评级数据,本文构建了贝叶斯分层图模型和银行间拆借矩阵,并利用蒙特卡洛模拟测度不同触发银行所引发的系统性风险损失、单个银行的系统性风险杠杆能力(文中定义为“传染乘数”指标)以及政府监管介入的效果。模拟结果显示:共同冲击损失远大于异质风险损失;规模和网络关联性是决定传染乘数的重要因素,且当规模因素不突出时,网络关联性对传染乘数的决定作用相对更强,极容易出现小规模、高关联性银行具有较高的传染乘数;当银行风险资产损失率在10%至25%之间时,造成系统性风险损失的杠杆能力普遍增强;政府监管介入能较好地降低系统性风险。本研究的相关结论为系统性风险的监管设计提供经验证据和参考。     

Bank income structure and risk: An empirical analysis of European banks

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between bank risk and product diversification in the changing structure of the European banking industry. Based on a broad set of European banks for the period 1996–2002, our study first shows that banks expanding into non-interest income activities present higher risk and higher insolvency risk than banks which mainly supply loans. However, considering size effects and splitting non-interest activities into both trading activities and commission and fee activities we show that the positive link with risk is mostly accurate for small banks and essentially driven by commission and fee activities. A higher share of trading activities is never associated with higher risk and for small banks it implies, in some cases, lower asset and default risks.     

Investor protection and the value effects of bank merger announcements in Europe and the US

Investor protection regimes have been shown to partly explain why the same type of corporate event may attract different investor reactions across countries. We compare the value effects of large bank merger announcements in Europe and the US and find an inverse relationship between the level of investor protection prevalent in the target country and abnormal returns that bidders realize during the announcement period. Accordingly, bidding banks realize higher returns when targeting low protection economies (most European economies) than bidders targeting institutions which operate under a high investor protection regime (the US). We argue that bidding bank shareholders need to be compensated for an increased risk of expropriation by insiders which they face in a low protection environment where takeover markets are illiquid and there are high private benefits of control.     

Delayed Expected Loss Recognition and the Risk Profile of Banks

This paper investigates the extent to which delayed expected loan loss recognition (DELR) is associated with greater vulnerability of banks to three distinct dimensions of risk: (1) stock market liquidity risk, (2) downside tail risk of individual banks, and (3) codependence of downside tail risk among banks. We hypothesize that DELR increases vulnerability to downside risk by creating expected loss overhangs that threaten future capital adequacy and by degrading bank transparency, which increases financing frictions and opportunities for risk‐shifting. We find that DELR is associated with higher correlations between bank‐level illiquidity and both aggregate banking sector illiquidity and market returns (i.e., higher liquidity risks) during recessions, suggesting that high DELR banks as a group may simultaneously face elevated financing frictions and enhanced opportunities for risk‐shifting behavior in crisis periods. With respect to downside risk, we find that during recessions DELR is associated with significantly higher risk of individual banks suffering severe drops in their equity values, where this association is magnified for banks with low capital levels. Consistent with increased systemic risk, we find that DELR is associated with significantly higher codependence between downside risk of individual banks and downside risk of the banking sector. We theorize that downside risk vulnerability at the individual bank level can translate into systemic risk by virtue of DELR creating a common source of risk vulnerability across high DELR banks simultaneously, which leads to risk codependence among banks and systemic effects from banks acting as part of a herd.     

Stress testing credit risk: The Great Depression scenario

By employing Moody’s corporate default and rating transition data spanning the last 90 years we explore how much capital banks should hold against their corporate loan portfolios to withstand historical stress scenarios. Specifically, we will focus on the worst case scenario over the observation period, the Great Depression. We find that migration risk and the length of the investment horizon are critical factors when determining bank capital needs in a crisis. We show that capital may need to rise more than three times when the horizon is increased from 1 year, as required by current and future regulation, to 3 years. Increases are still important but of a lower magnitude when migration risk is introduced in the analysis. Further, we find that the new bank capital requirements under the so-called Basel 3 agreement would enable banks to absorb Great Depression-style losses. But, such losses would dent regulatory capital considerably and far beyond the capital buffers that have been proposed to ensure that banks survive crisis periods without government support.     

CEO Bonus Compensation and Bank Default Risk: Evidence from the U.S. and Europe

We investigate the link between the incentive mechanisms embedded in CEO cash bonuses and the riskiness of banks. For a sample of U.S. and European banks, we employ the Merton distance to default model to show that increases in CEO cash bonuses lower the default risk of a bank. However, we find no evidence of cash bonuses exerting a risk‐reducing effect when banks are financially distressed or when banks operate under weak bank regulatory regimes. Our results link bonus compensation in banking to financial stability and caution that attempts to regulate bonus pay need to tailor CEO incentives to the riskiness of banks and to regulatory regimes.     

Bank regulatory capital and liquidity: Evidence from US and European publicly traded banks

The theory of financial intermediation highlights various channels through which capital and liquidity are interrelated. Using a simultaneous equations framework, we investigate the relationship between bank regulatory capital and bank liquidity measured from on-balance sheet positions for European and US publicly traded commercial banks. Previous research studying the determinants of bank capital buffer has neglected the role of liquidity. On the whole, we find that banks decrease their regulatory capital ratios when they face higher illiquidity as defined in the Basel III accords or when they create more liquidity as measured by Berger and Bouwman (2009). However, considering other measures of illiquidity that focus more closely on core deposits in the United States, our results show that small banks strengthen their solvency standards when they are exposed to higher illiquidity. Our empirical investigation supports the need to implement minimum liquidity ratios concomitant to capital ratios, as stressed by the Basel Committee; however, our findings also shed light on the need to further clarify how to define and measure illiquidity and also on how to regulate large banking institutions, which behave differently than smaller ones.     

The risk of financial intermediaries

This paper reconsiders the formal estimation of bank risk using the variability of the profit function. In our model, point estimates of the variability of profits are derived from a model where this variability is endogenous to other bank characteristics, such as capital and liquidity. We estimate the new model on the entire panel of US banks, spanning the period 1985q1–2012q4. The findings show that bank risk was fairly stable up to 2001 and accelerated quickly thereafter up to 2007. We also establish that the risk of the relatively large banks and banks that failed in the subprime crisis is higher than the industry’s average. Thus, we provide a new leading indicator, which is able to forecast future solvency problems of banks.     

政策连续性与商业银行系统性风险

本文基于2007年第一季度至2019年第四季度中国A股32家上市银行非平衡面板数据,从“冲击”和“传染”两个维度考察了政策连续性对银行系统性风险的影响。实证结果表明,政策连续性程度的提高通过降低银行个体风险和减弱银行个体与系统的关联性进而显著降低了银行系统性风险。进一步分析发现,政策连续性降低了银行被动风险承担水平而非主动风险承担意愿,减弱了银行间接关联程度而非直接关联程度。异质性分析表明,经济下行和货币宽松时期,政策连续性对系统性风险的降低效应更大,并且本身破产风险越高、信息透明度越低的银行,其系统性风险受政策连续性的影响越大。区分不同类型的政策发现,货币政策、财政政策、汇率与资本项目政策的连续性上升均能显著降低银行系统性风险,其中货币政策连续性对银行系统性风险的影响力度最大。     

Is bank default risk systematic?

We evaluate the impact of commonly used indicators of bank distress on broad (i.e. sector and country) risks. This issue deserves special attention in the banking industry where there is a strong degree of interconnectedness among institutions and the default of a single bank may cause a cascading failure, which could potentially bankrupt the entire system. Using several measures of individual bank risk our results show that these measures have a direct impact on European banking (i.e. systemic) stock market risk. We also provide strong evidence suggesting that, for listed banks, default risk tends to be systematic (i.e. non-diversifiable).     

Do foreign banks increase competition? Evidence from emerging Asian and Latin American banking markets

In this paper we examine the impact of foreign bank penetration on the competitive structure of domestic banking sectors in host emerging economies. We focus our analysis on Asia and Latin America during the period 1997-2008. Using bank-level panel data to identify foreign banks and to estimate measures of banking competition, we are able to provide robust empirical evidence that an increase in foreign bank penetration enhances competition in these host countries’ banking sectors. We find that this positive foreign bank penetration and banking competition link is associated with a spillover effect from foreign banks to their domestic counterparts. This spillover effect becomes stronger when more efficient and less risky foreign banks enter into less concentrated host country markets. We also find that the spillover effect is greater when foreign banks enter in the form of ‘de novo penetration’ than through mergers or acquisitions of domestic banks (‘M&A penetration’).