Distance, Lending Relationships, and Competition

We study the effect on loan conditions of geographical distance between firms, the lending bank, and all other banks in the vicinity. For our study, we employ detailed contract information from more than 15,000 bank loans to small firms comprising the entire loan portfolio of a large Belgian bank. We report the first comprehensive evidence on the occurrence of spatial price discrimination in bank lending. Loan rates decrease with the distance between the firm and the lending bank and increase with the distance between the firm and competing banks. Transportation costs cause the spatial price discrimination we observe.     

Capital Regulation and Competition as a Moderator for Banking Stability

Capital regulation forces banks to fund a substantial amount of their investments with equity. This creates a buffer against losses but also increases the cost of funding. If higher funding costs translate into higher loan interest rates, the bank's assets are also likely to become more risky, which may destabilize the lending bank. This paper argues that the level of competition in the banking sector can determine whether the buffer or cost effect prevails. The endogenous level of competition may be crucial in determining the efficiency of capital regulation in undercapitalized banking sectors, with excess capacities and correlated risks.     

Competition,Efficiency, and Stability in Banking

We examine the effect of competition on banking stability using a new measure of competition based on the reallocation of profits from inefficient banks to efficient ones. In a sample of European Banks, we find that this measure does capture competition, that competition is stability‐enhancing, and that the stability‐enhancing effect of competition is greater for healthy banks than for fragile ones. Our results suggest that efficiency is the conduit through which competition contributes to stability and that regulators must condition policy on the health of existing banks.     

Small-Business Lending and Profit Efficiency in Commercial Banking

We use nonparametric linear programming methods to calculate the directional distance function and the profit function for a random sample of banks from 1994 to 1999. The estimates imply that the gain in small-business lending from reducing technical inefficiency is minor compared to the gain possible from eliminating allocative inefficiency. Actual small-business lending early in the sample period is less than optimal, but the misallocation is confined to small banks. As a percentage of assets, small-business lending is larger for the most efficient banks.     

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.     

商业银行价格竞争与风险行为关系——基于贷款利率市场化的经验研究

人民币贷款利率市场化改革是我国商业银行竞争格局形成的重要步骤。本文采用1998～2010年14家主要的全国性商业银行的面板数据,在建立联立方程模型利用似不相关回归技术对银行贷款价格竞争度指标Lerner指数进行计算的基础上,运用固定效应估计方法和Driscoll-Kraay稳健标准差,实证检验了银行价格竞争与其风险行为的关系。研究结果表明:(1)2004年10月贷款利率上限的放开成为商业银行深化价格竞争的开端;(2)现阶段,价格竞争有助于缓解银行的信贷风险,但对于其整体经营风险的控制并无显著影响;(3)利率上限的取消并不直接影响银行的信贷风险调整行为,不过却可能造成其阶段性的经营风险。     

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.     

Competition in Lending: Theory and Experiments*

A variation of the Rothschild-Stiglitz’ equilibrium is examined in the context of competitive lending under adverse selection. The predictions of the model are tested in an experimental market setting. If equilibrium exists, the loan contracts offered and taken should separate projects by quality. When equilibrium exists, the experiments confirm the theory. The entrepreneurs with high-risk projects take bigger loans and pay higher credit spreads than those with low-risk projects. When equilibrium does not exist, which happens exactly when the candidate equilibrium does not provide a Pareto-optimal allocation, in half of the sessions loan trading stabilizes around the candidate equilibrium pair. In the other half, however, markets never settle down. This finding has important implications. When lenders can offer menus of contracts, as is usually the case in reality, the outcome may not be the zero-profit separating contracts of the standard model. Worse, fitting the standard model to field data may lead to serious biases in estimated parameters while falsely accepting the model’s main restriction (separation). *The financial support of the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at Caltech is gratefully acknowledged. I would like to thank Charles Plott, Thomas Palfrey, Bill Zame, Mike Lemmon, as well as the seminar participants at Caltech, UCSD, Duke, Berkeley, Stanford, University of Utah, Columbia, Georgia State University, Tulane, University of Houston, and Arizona State University for helpful comments, and the staff of EEPS, SSEL, and CASSEL for their help in running the experiments. I am especially grateful to my advisor and mentor Peter Bossaerts for his guidance and encouragement. All errors are my own.     

Banking Competition and Capital Ratios

Empirical studies provide evidence that bank capital ratios exceed regulatory requirements. But why do banks maintain capital levels above regulatory requirements? We use data for more than 2,600 banks from 10 European countries to test recent theories suggesting that competition incentivises banks to maintain higher capital ratios. These theories also predict that banks that engage in arm's length lending have lower capital ratios, and that shareholder rights and deposit insurance characteristics affect capital ratios. Consistent with these theories, our evidence robustly indicates that competition increases capital holdings. Banks that lend at arm's length exhibit lower capital ratios, whereas banks in countries with strong shareholder rights operate with higher capital ratios. We also show some evidence that generous deposit protection schemes that exclude non‐deposit creditors are associated with higher capital ratios. Our results have important policy implications. First, while the traditional view suggests imposing restrictions on bank activities in order to restrain competition, our analysis indicates the opposite, even after adjusting the regressions for risk‐taking. Second, weak shareholder rights undermine market forces that would otherwise encourage banks to hold higher capital ratios.     

Banking Competition,Collateral Constraints,and Optimal Monetary Policy

We analyze optimal monetary policy in a model with two distinct financial frictions: monopolistically competitive banks that charge endogenous lending spreads, and collateral constraints. We show that welfare maximization is equivalent to stabilization of four goals: inflation, output gap, the “consumption gap” between borrowers and savers, and a “housing gap” that measures the distortion in the distribution of the collateralizable asset between both groups. Collateral constraints create a trade‐off between stabilization goals. Following both productivity and financial shocks, and relative to strict inflation targeting, the optimal policy implies sharper movements in the policy rate, aimed primarily at reducing fluctuations in asset prices and hence in borrowers' net worth. The policy trade‐offs become amplified as banking competition increases, due to the fall in lending spreads and the resulting increase in borrowers' leverage.     

Competition, Adverse Selection, and Information Dispersion in the Banking Industry

Proprietary information generated through the process of lendingcan impact the structure of the banking industry. With morecompeting banks, borrower-specific information becomes moredisperse, as each bank becomes informed about a smaller poolof borrowers. This reduces banks' screening ability, creatingan inefficiency as more low-quality borrowers obtain financing.Incumbent banks' information advantage may also create difficultiesfor potential entrants, so that entry should be easier in marketswith high borrower turnover or where entrants have specificexpertise in evaluating credit risks. We draw implications forwhether financial deregulation is likely to increase borrowers'surplus, and what patterns of entry might be observed.     

银行监管的重新思考

最新研究清楚地表明,银行业的兴衰关系全社会各界人士的福利.特别是当银行倒闭的时候,的确,80年代至90年代的发展中国家银行危机所带来的财政损失     

Risk in Banking and Capital Regulation

This paper investigates the role of bank capital regulation in risk control. It is known that banks choose portfolios of higher risk because of inefficiently priced deposit insurance. Bank capital regulation is a way to redress this bias toward risk. Utilizing the mean-variance model, the following results are shown: (a) the use of simple capital ratios in regulation is an ineffective means to bound the insolvency risk of banks; (b) as a solution to problems of the capital ratio regulation, the “theoretically correct” risk weights under the risk-based capital plan are explicitly derived; and (c) the “theoretically correct” risk weights are restrictions on asset composition, which alters the optimal portfolio choice of banking firms.     

Competition and diversification in the European Banking Sector

This paper provides new insights into the relationship between competition and diversification based on a sample of 1,570 commercial banks located in 28 European Union member states over the period of 2000 through 2016. The adjusted Lerner index and income diversification are the main indicators that account for bank-level competition and non-traditional activities. As robustness checks, we used Boone indicator along with diversification that was measured by the share of off-balance sheet items in total assets. We ran the estimations using multilevel analysis at country- and bank-level. Overall, competition stimulates bank diversification as financial institutions are continuously searching for additional sources of income to finance their competitive strategies. Bank performance, efficiency and R&D expenditure have positive effects on diversification. Opposite impacts characterize the market capitalization of listed domestic companies and GDP growth.     

市场竞争、产权改革与商业银行贷款行为转变

本文运用2002～2007年中国省际面板数据,利用固定效应和系统广义矩估计方法考察了市场竞争与产权改革对中国商业银行贷款行为的影响。本文得出三个主要结论:一是从整体来看,中国商业银行贷款行为的商业导向仍然有待改善,表现在商业银行贷款增长率与盈利能力之间显著负相关;二是市场竞争改善了商业银行的贷款行为,推动了商业银行贷款行为向商业导向转变;三是产权改革对商业银行贷款行为没有显著的影响。本文的研究对进一步深化中国银行业体制改革具有重要的政策含义。     

关系型借贷、银行竞争与中小企业融资研究述评

目前,银企关系、银行竞争对中小企业信贷融资的影响还存在争议。本文系统梳理了银企关系和银行竞争对中小企业融资影响的相关文献,从中小企业借贷可得性、成本和风险的角度,全面考察了银企关系和银行竞争的影响,同时分析了两者的相互作用。结果显示,银企关系、银行竞争会对中小企业信贷融资产生影响,且银企关系与银行竞争之间存在交互作用,但银企关系、银行竞争对中小企业融资的具体影响方向、大小存在显著的国别差异。在考察我国中小企业信贷融资过程中,需要结合宏观经济和信贷市场实际情况,区分不同理论的适用性,以期为缓解中小企业融资难题的研究和实践提供借鉴。     

Private Money and Banking Regulation

We show that a competitive banking system is inconsistent with an optimum quantity of private money. Because bankers cannot commit to their promises and the composition of their assets is not publicly observable, a positive franchise value is required to induce the full convertibility of bank liabilities. Under perfect competition, a positive franchise value can be obtained only if the return on bank liabilities is sufficiently low, which imposes a cost on those who hold these liabilities for transaction purposes. If the banking system is monopolistic, then an efficient allocation is incentive feasible. In this case, the members of the banking system obtain a higher return on assets, making it feasible to pay a sufficiently high return on bank liabilities. Finally, we argue that the regulation of the banking system is required to obtain efficiency.     

Macroeconomic Shocks and Banking Regulation

The recent crisis has brought to the fore the cyclical properties of banking regulation. Countercyclical buffers and enhanced capital requirements meant to stabilize banks’ balance sheets across the cycle are not costless, and a delicate balance needs to be reached between providing incentives to generate value and discouraging excessive risk taking. The paper develops a model in which, in contrast with Modigliani–Miller, outside equity and capital requirements matter. It analyses banking regulation in the presence of macroeconomic shocks and studies the desirability of self‐insurance mechanisms such as countercyclical capital buffers or dynamic provisioning, as well as “macro‐hedges” such as CoCos and capital insurance.     

Competition,concentration and risk taking in Banking sector of MENA countries

This paper tests the relationship between competition and bank stability for 356 banks operating in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) countries during the period 2005–2012. Our results show that for the overall sample, a U-shaped relationship between competition and banks’ risk taking for MENA banks. The negative linear relationship between Z-Score and H-statistics in Gulf countries shows that an increase in competition leads to a reduction in the level of financial stability. In the case of other non-Gulf countries, the increase of competition in uncompetitive markets can lead to an increase in stability. The results confirm the importance of the market structure as an explanatory factor for financial stability, but also indicate that concentration is not associated with uncompetitive markets.