Liquidity Provision,Bank Capital,and the Macroeconomy

New bank equity must come from somewhere. In general equilibrium, raising bank capital requirements means either that banks produce less short‐term debt (as debt holders must become shareholders), or short‐term debt is not reduced and the banking system acquires nonbank equity (as the shareholders in nonbanks become shareholders in banks). The welfare effects involve a trade‐off because bank debt is special as it is used for transactions purposes, but more bank capital can reduce the chance of bank failure (producing welfare losses).     

Bank Earnings Management and Tail Risk during the Financial Crisis

We show that a pattern of earnings management in bank financial statements has little bearing on downside risk during quiet periods, but seems to have a big impact during a financial crisis. Banks demonstrating more aggressive earnings management prior to 2007 exhibit substantially higher stock market risk once the financial crisis begins as measured by the incidence of large weekly stock price “crashes” as well as by the pattern of full‐year returns. Stock price crashes also predict future deterioration in operating performance. Bank regulators may therefore interpret them as early warning signs of impending problems.     

Bank Capital Regulation of Trading Portfolios: An Assessment of the Basel Framework

In setting minimum capital requirements for trading portfolios, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (1996, 2011a, 2013) initially used Value‐at‐Risk (VaR), then both VaR and stressed VaR (SVaR), and most recently, stressed Conditional VaR (SCVaR). Accordingly, we examine the use of SCVaR to measure risk and set these requirements. Assuming elliptically distributed asset returns, we show that portfolios on the mean‐SCVaR frontier generally lie away from the mean‐variance (M‐V) frontier. In a plausible numerical example, we find that such portfolios tend to have considerably higher ratios of risk (measured by, e.g., standard deviation) to minimum capital requirement than those of portfolios on the M‐V frontier. Also, we find that requirements based on SCVaR are smaller than those based on both VaR and SVaR but exceed those based on just VaR. Finally, we find that requirements based on SCVaR are less procyclical than those based on either VaR or both VaR and SVaR. Overall, our paper suggests that the use of SCVaR to measure risk and set requirements is not a panacea.     

The Roles of Corporate Governance in Bank Failures during the Recent Financial Crisis

We analyze the roles of bank ownership, management, and compensation structures in bank failures during the recent financial crisis. Our results suggest that failures are strongly influenced by ownership structure: high shareholdings of lower‐level management and non‐chief executive officer (non‐CEO) higher‐level management increase failure risk significantly. In contrast, shareholdings of banks’ CEOs do not have a direct impact on bank failure. These findings suggest that high stakes in the bank induce non‐CEO managers to take high risks due to moral hazard incentives, which may result in bank failure. We identify tail risk in noninterest income as a primary risk‐taking channel of lower‐level managers.     

Foreign Bank Behavior during Financial Crises

This paper studies whether lending by foreign banks is affected by financial crises. We pair a bank‐level data set of foreign ownership with information on banking crises and examine whether the credit supply of majority foreign‐owned banks that underwent home‐country crises differ systematically from those of other foreign banks. In contrast to the literature, our broad global coverage allows us to exploit variations between foreign banks; this enables us to identify an average treatment effect directly attributable to crises. Our baseline results show that banks exposed to home‐country crises between 2007–08 exhibit changes in lending patterns that are lower by between 13% and 42% than their noncrisis counterparts. This finding is robust to potential alternative explanations, and also holds, though less strongly, for the 1997/98 Asian crisis.     

影子银行与金融危机

本文认为,此次全球金融危机的根源在于回购市场挤提引起的银行恐慌。机构投资者是回购市场的需求者,他们向影子银行"存款",影子银行则以资产抵押支持证券保证"存款"的安全。当证券化资产的折价率大幅提高时,就出现了回购市场挤提,引起银行恐慌,从而导致了此次全球金融危机。     

The Impact of the 2007 Liquidity Shock on Bank Jumbo Mortgage Lending

This paper explores the consequences of the collapse of the private‐label residential mortgage‐backed securities market in 2007 on banks’ originations of jumbo mortgages. We show that jumbo lending declined by more at banks that were more dependent on this market and were less well capitalized. In contrast, banks that had little dependence on this market and were well capitalized increased jumbo originations. These findings highlight how dependence on the secondary market may cause amplification of financial shocks, and the potential value of capital requirements that are higher during periods of economic growth in mitigating the amplification effects.     

Liquidity Coinsurance and Bank Capital

Banks can deal with their liquidity risk by holding liquid assets (self‐insurance), by participating in interbank markets (coinsurance), or by using flexible financing instruments, such as bank capital (risk sharing). We use a simple model to show that undiversifiable liquidity risk, that is, the liquidity risk that banks are unable to coinsure on interbank markets, represents an important risk factor affecting their capital structures. Banks facing higher undiversifiable liquidity risk hold more capital. We posit that, empirically, banks that are more exposed to undiversifiable liquidity risk are less active on interbank markets. Therefore, we test for the existence of a negative relationship between bank capital and interbank market activity and find support in a large sample of U.S. commercial banks.     

Fund Management and Systemic Risk – Lessons from the Global Financial Crisis

Fund managers play an important role in increasing efficiency and stability in financial markets. But research also indicates that fund management in certain circumstances may contribute to the buildup of systemic risk and severity of financial crises. The global financial crisis provided a number of new experiences on the contribution of fund managers to systemic risk. In this article, we focus on these lessons from the crisis. We distinguish between three sources of systemic risk in the financial system that may arise from fund management: insufficient credit risk transfer to fund managers; runs on funds that cause sudden reductions in funding to banks and other financial entities; and contagion through business ties between fund managers and their sponsors. Our discussion relates to the current intense debate on the role the so‐called shadow banking system played in the global financial crisis. Several regulatory initiatives have been launched or suggested to reduce the systemic risk arising from non‐bank financial entities, and we briefly discuss the likely impact of these on the sources of systemic risk outlined in the article.     

全球金融危机中公司治理的经验与教训研究

本文从公司治理的视角,分析了全球金融危机中欧美金融业暴露的严重公司治理问题及应对措施。文章提出对股权结构越分散越好、股权激励力度越大越好、股东利益至上及大而不倒等信条的反思,并认为此次金融危机有如下启示:一是在监管中必须重视系统效应的监管责任、逐步建立综合监管模式、探索开展逆经济周期监管;二是中国大型商业银行要处理好创新与发展的关系;三是合理设计薪酬激励机制;四是在风险管理中必须坚持稳健经营理念、加强全面风险管理、理性开展金融创新;五是在董事会建设方面要提高董事会素质、强化风险管理及关注企业社会责任。     

Bank Corporate Governance,Beyond the Global Banking Crisis

Following up on the publication of the Walker Report ( 2009 ) in the United Kingdom, international organizations such as the Basel Committee ( 2010 ), the OECD ( 2010 ), and the European Union ( 2010 ) have proposed guidelines to improve bank corporate governance and, more specifically, risk governance. These international reports vary widely on what the prime objective of bank corporate governance should be, with one group recommending a shareholder‐based approach, and the other a stakeholder‐based one. Moreover, the focus of these reports is exclusively on risk avoidance, with little guidance as to how an acceptable level of risk should be defined. Drawing on insights from economics and finance, this paper is intended to contribute to the debate on bank corporate governance. Our four main conclusions are as follows. Firstly, the debate on bank governance should concern not only the boards but also the governance of banking supervision with clearly identified accountability principles. Secondly, since biases for short‐term profit maximization are numerous in banking, boards of banks should focus on long‐term value creation. Thirdly, board members and banking supervisors should pay special attention to cognitive biases in risk identification and measurement. Fourthly, a value‐based approach to risk taking must take into account the probability of stress scenarios and the associated costs of financial distress. Mitigation of these costs should be addressed explicitly in the design of bank strategy.     

Time‐Varying Capital Requirements and Disclosure Rules: Effects on Capitalization and Lending Decisions

We investigate how banks’ capital and lending decisions respond to changes in bank‐specific capital and disclosure requirements. We find that an increase in the bank‐specific regulatory capital requirement results in a higher bank capital ratio, brought about via less asset risk. A decrease in the requirement implies more lending to firms but also less Tier 1 capital and higher bank leverage. We do not observe differences between confidential and public disclosure of capital requirements. Our results empirically illustrate a tradeoff between bank resilience and a fostering of the economy through more bank lending using banks’ capital requirement as policy instrument.     

Internal Capital Markets and Capital Structure: Bank Versus Internal Debt

We argue that domestic business groups are able to actively optimise the internal/external debt mix across their subsidiaries. Novel to the literature, we use bi‐level data (i.e. data from both individual subsidiary financial statements and consolidated group level financial statements) to model the bank and internal debt concentration of non‐financial Belgian private business group affiliates. As a benchmark, we construct a size and industry matched sample of non‐group affiliated (stand‐alone) companies. We find support for a pecking order of internal debt over bank debt at the subsidiary level which leads to a substantially lower bank debt concentration for group affiliates as compared to stand‐alone companies. The internal debt concentration of a subsidiary is mainly driven by the characteristics of the group's internal capital market. The larger its available resources, the more intra‐group debt is used while bank debt financing at the subsidiary level decreases. However, as the group's overall debt level mounts, groups increasingly locate bank borrowing in subsidiaries with low costs of external financing (i.e. large subsidiaries with important collateral assets) to limit moral hazard and dissipative costs. Overall, our results are consistent with the existence of a complex group wide optimisation process of financing costs.     

Dissecting Foreign Bank Lending Behavior During the 2008–2009 Crisis

This paper analyzes the lending behavior of foreign‐owned banks during the recent global crisis. Using bank‐level panel data for 51 countries, the paper explores the role of affiliate and parent financial characteristics, host location, as well as the impact of parent geographic origin and reach on foreign banks’ credit growth. Overall, the analysis finds robust evidence that foreign banks curtailed the growth of credit relative to other banks, independent of the host region in which they operate. Banks from the United States reduced loan growth less than other parent banks. Neither the global nor regional reach of parent banks influenced the lending growth of foreign affiliates. Parent capitalization and not parent funding explained the behavior of foreign bank credit growth during the global crisis. However, funding did affect the lending behavior of domestic and foreign banks in host countries, with those relying more heavily on deposits suffering a smaller decline in bank lending. Although not the focus of the paper, we also find that government‐owned banks played a countercyclical role in all regions.     

Bank Capital Regulation and Structured Finance

We model the interaction between bank capital regulation and financial innovation. Innovation takes the form of structured finance, namely, pooling and tranching of assets and the creation of separate structures with different seniority, different risk, and different capital charges. Structured finance can improve welfare by manufacturing safer securities, saving on the capital that the structures with different seniority need to satisfy incentive constraints. The divergence between private and social interests in future profits motivates regulation. Regulation lowers profits and may induce banks to innovate to evade the regulation itself, even if this decreases welfare.     

Procyclical Capital Regulation and Lending

We use a quasi‐experimental research design to examine the effect of model‐based capital regulation on the procyclicality of bank lending and firms' access to funds. In response to an exogenous shock to credit risk in the German economy, capital charges for loans under model‐based regulation increased by 0.5 percentage points. As a consequence, banks reduced the amount of these loans by 2.1 to 3.9 percentage points more than for loans under the traditional approach with fixed capital charges. We find an even stronger effect when we examine aggregate firm borrowing, suggesting that microprudential capital regulation can have sizeable real effects.     

Determinants of Bank Debt in a Continental Financial System: Evidence from Spanish Companies

We test hypotheses about the structure of corporate debt ownership and the use of bank debt by firms in a civil‐law country, Spain. We focus on bank debt effects in the presence of information asymmetries and agency costs, and on efficient versus inefficient firm liquidation. We find that the relation between growth opportunities and bank financing is not as strong as the one found in common‐law countries, that there is a positive relation between firm size and the proportion of bank debt used, and that firms closer to bankruptcy and highly leveraged are more likely to use bank debt.     

Procyclicality,Bank Lending,and the Macroeconomic Implications of a Revised Basel Accord

Bank regulators are in the process of implementing revised regulatory capital standards. However, the macroeconomic effects of a revised Basel Accord are uncertain. Examining the various channels through which the revised Accord may influence economic output suggests that making the buffer stock of capital positively related to the business cycle is necessary to reduce procyclicality. This can be accomplished by bank regulators using either enhanced supervisory powers or increased financial disclosure.     

全球金融危机下投资银行发展模式研究

美国华尔街危机是包括银行、保险公司、对冲基金等机构在内的全面危机,是各类机构以高杠杆进行金融市场交易类业务并导致巨额亏损的后果.美国独立投行的消失也并不意味着投行实体的消失,以大型银行为主体的金融控股集团确实具有更强的抗风险能力.承销、并购、财务顾问等投行业务在中国仍然前景广阔,但金融市场交易领域的创新确需谨慎.在重塑...