Bank Mergers and Small Firm Finance: Evidence from Lender Liability

As a merger approaches, the value of repeat business for the target bank can drop sharply, so loan relationships between this bank and small businesses are often disrupted. Small firms sometimes experience serious value destruction as a consequence of this sudden lack of credit. This paper shows that lender liability may result from bank mergers and bankers involved in mergers often engage in aggressive, scorched‐earth defense tactics to discourage further litigation. I summarize six lender liability cases to illustrate these points. Bank mergers have been shown to reduce credit availability in a number of studies. Since small firms depend on credit for their daily existence, owners of small firms do have a reason to fear a merger of their bank with a larger institution. Analyzing merger effects with survey data of firms obtained after a bank merger, an empirical strategy used in a number of studies, raises problems since the only firms considered are the ones that survived the bank merger. Suggesting that the problem will cure itself in the long run, an argument advanced in other studies, ignores small firms' daily dependence on credit. In the long run we are all dead. Bank examiners need to evaluate an institution's litigation experience and measure a bank's organizational architecture – its ethical climate. Banks which are repeatedly involved in lender liability lawsuits should be denied future mergers until there is a change in organizational architecture. To assist in evaluating organizational architecture, banks should be required to report their litigation expense on their call reports. Furthermore, regulators should seriously consider the recent suggestion of Carow, Kane and Narayanan (2006) that they take steps to ensure that participants in bank mergers preserve target bank relationships. Otherwise negative effects on small business lending and economic growth will continue as bank consolidation proceeds.     

The Lender of Last Resort Reconsidered

The Central Bank's lender of last resort role was developed by a series of authors in the very late eighteenth and through the nineteenth centuries. It was tested in practice in a number of countries and was found to be effective in providing monetary stability in the face of adverse shocks. There have recently been attempts to broaden the role—to make the central bank responsible for the stability of asset markets, or for protecting individual banks—and there have recently also been claims that an international lender of last resort is necessary. This article considers and rejects these proposed extensions to the classic lender of last resort role.     

Lender Automation and Racial Disparities in Credit Access

Process automation reduces racial disparities in credit access by enabling smaller loans, broadening banks' geographic reach, and removing human biases from decision making. We document these findings in the context of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), where private lenders faced no credit risk but decided which firms to serve. Black-owned firms obtained PPP loans primarily from automated fintech lenders, especially in areas with high racial animus. After traditional banks automated their loan processing procedures, their PPP lending to Black-owned firms increased. Our findings cannot be fully explained by racial differences in loan application behaviors, preexisting banking relationships, firm performance, or fraud rates.     

最后贷款人政策与银行危机管理

最后贷款人政策是银行危机管理的一个重要手段 ,也是银行安全网的主要组成部分。本文首先介绍了最后贷款人的传统理论 ,讨论了该机制在化解系统风险中的作用及其可能产生的道德风险问题。然后文章探讨了最后贷款人在现实中面临的一些挑战。最后 ,作者对中国人民银行的政策实践作了一个简要的评价     

Association Between Borrower and Lender State Ownership and Accounting Conservatism

We examine the association between borrower (firm) and lender (bank) state ownership and accounting conservatism for a sample of Chinese firms. We hypothesize that state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) adopt less conservative accounting than non‐state‐owned enterprises (NSOEs) because lenders are less concerned with downside risk for SOEs than for NSOEs. We also hypothesize a negative relation between conservatism and the fraction of total loans a firm borrows from state‐owned banks (SBs) because SBs have weaker demand for assurance of sufficient net assets to cover loan repayments than non‐state‐owned banks (NSBs). We find support for both hypotheses. Further analyses reveal that: (1) firms that borrow from commercial SBs exhibit more conservative accounting than firms that borrow from policy SBs and (2) firms adopt more conservative accounting as they get more loans from banks with foreign ownership or exclusively foreign banks. However, the results of these additional analyses are to some extent sensitive to alternative measures of accounting conservatism.     

Large Investors, Price Manipulation, and Limits to Arbitrage: An Anatomy of Market Corners

Corners were prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. We first develop a rational expectations model of corners and show that they can arise as the result of rational behavior. Then, using a novel hand-collected data set, we investigate price and trading behavior around several well-known stock market and commodity corners which occurred between 1863 and 1980. We find strong evidence that large investors and corporate insiders possess market power that allows them to manipulate prices. Manipulation leading to a market corner tends to increase market volatility and has an adverse price impact on other assets. We also find that the presence of large investors makes it risky for would-be short sellers to trade against the mispricing. Therefore, regulators and exchanges need to be concerned about ensuring that corners do not take place since they are accompanied by severe price distortions.     

Individual Investors and Volatility

We show that retail trading activity has a positive effect on the volatility of stock returns, which suggests that retail investors behave as noise traders. To identify this effect, we use a reform of the French stock market that raises the relative cost of speculative trading for retail investors. The daily return volatility of the stocks affected by the reform falls by 20 basis points (a quarter of the sample standard deviation of the return volatility) relative to other stocks. For affected stocks, we also find a significant decrease in the magnitude of return reversals and the price impact of trades.     

水晶投资人--访丹麦发展中国家工业化基金会北京代表处首席代表姜红

本刊记者在采访丹麦驻华大使白慕申先生时,他一再向我们推荐丹麦发展中国家工业化基金会(IFU),他说基金会在促进丹麦在华投资中起到非常积极的作用.     

Lender of last resort: A contemporary perspective

This article re-examines the role of the central bank's lender of last resort (LLR) function in the current economic environment. It argues that the traditional role of protecting the money supply from collapse is no longer valid. LLR intervention is appropriate to offset temporary liquidity strains that are likely to depress asset prices and aggregate real income below their equilibrium levels. However, such support should be provided only rarely and through open market operations rather than the discount window.This article was started while the author was visiting the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The article was improved by constructive suggestions received from Douglas Evanoff, Gillian Garcia, Robert Laurent, Gerald O'Driscoll, Anna Schwartz, and an anonymous referee.     

会计稳健性、贷款抵押与银企所有权模式

会计稳健性和抵押是缓解债务契约中代理问题的替代机制,本文探讨了银行和企业的国有属性对二者替代关系的影响。研究表明,银行与企业的国有权属性减弱了债务契约中抵押条款与会计稳健性之间的替代关系,即抵押品与会计稳健性在缓解债务契约中代理问题方面的替代效应在国有企业中相对较弱,二者的替代效应会随企业向国有银行贷款比重的增加而减弱。这一结果给我们的启示是,非国有企业在向银行贷款时,可以通过提高财务报表的稳健性来降低银行对其抵押品的要求。     

Institutional Investors and Shareholder Litigation

We examine whether institutional investors are able to avoid future litigation. Our results show that institutions provide a fiduciary role by decreasing or eliminating their positions in sued firms well before litigation begins. We also find that institutional groups with high monitoring ability (independent investment advisors and mutual funds) are more proactive in their trading behavior than are institutions with low monitoring ability (banks, insurance companies, and unclassified institutions such as endowments, foundations, and self-managed pension funds). We find that percentage changes in institutional ownership are correlated with public information available more than two quarters before litigation.     

新股发行中机构投资者和中小投资者的利益平衡机制研究

在新股发行中如何有效地平衡机构投资者和中小投资者利益,分别发挥机构投资者和中小投资者的功能,成为一个颇受关注的话题.本文分析了我国新股发行中机构投资者与中小投资者利益关系的现状,指出我国新股发行制度存在的缺陷,对协调两类投资者利益关系提出了政策建议.     

Institutional Investors and Private Equity

Entrepreneurial finance literature has highlighted that institutionalinvestors are the main contributors to private equity funds.This paper complements these findings by documenting that institutionalinvestors also invest directly in private equity. A major concernfor such investments is the higher agency costs associated withprivate equity. We show that institutions invest in privatefirms with governance mechanisms that tend to reduce the expectedagency costs and risk of minority expropriation. Good governancemechanisms further allow institutional investors to enjoy thebenefits of syndication and thereby reduce idiosyncratic risk.In addition, we show that institutional investments tend tobe followed by further improvements in corporate governanceand tend to occur in high-growth firms within research and developmentintensive industries.     

Institutional Investors and Executive Compensation

We find that institutional ownership concentration is positively related to the pay‐for‐performance sensitivity of executive compensation and negatively related to the level of compensation, even after controlling for firm size, industry, investment opportunities, and performance. These results suggest that the institutions serve a monitoring role in mitigating the agency problem between shareholders and managers. Additionally, we find that clientele effects exist among institutions for firms with certain compensation structures, suggesting that institutions also influence compensation structures through their preferences.     

Individual Investors and Local Bias

The paper tests whether individuals have value‐relevant information about local stocks (where “local” is defined as being headquartered near where an investor lives). Our methodology uses two types of calendar‐time portfolios—one based on holdings and one based on transactions. Portfolios of local holdings do not generate abnormal performance (alphas are zero). When studying transactions, purchases of local stocks significantly underperform sales of local stocks. The underperformance remains when focusing on stocks with potentially high levels of information asymmetries. We conclude that individuals do not help incorporate information into stock prices. Our conclusions directly contradict existing studies.