DO DEPOSITORS RESPOND RATIONALLY TO BANK RISKS? EVIDENCE FROM JAPANESE BANKS DURING CRISES

This paper empirically examines depositors' ability to distinguish healthy banks from problematic banks, a necessary condition for depositors to impose discipline on banking institutions. We analyzed a large panel of 784 deposit‐taking institutions in Japan during the period from the 1992 financial year to the 2002 financial year. Our estimates indicate that depositors rightly appreciated the difference between healthy banks and risky banks, and that depositors of larger institutions are more sensitive to the bank risks than those of smaller institutions. We further argue that the estimated risk sensitivities of depositors are large enough to discipline the deposit‐taking institutions.     

商业银行监管的国际比较:模式及影响——兼论中国的商业银行监管模式选择

本文系统研究了世界上 1 1 8个国家 (地区 )的商业银行监管模式及其对金融发展水平的影响。基于以下四种维度的不同组合 :1 )政府拥有银行的程度 ;2 )政府直接监管银行的力度 ;3 )政府授权非政府机构进行监管的力度 ;4)明确的存款保险制度涵盖范围 ,我们把世界各国 (地区 )的商业银行监管模式划分为三大类 :1 )印度 -中国型 ;2 )南非-菲律宾 -墨西哥型 ;3 )德国 -美国 -瑞士 -法国型。比较不同的监管模式 ,在促进金融业发展方面 ,德国 -美国 -瑞士 -法国型的监管模式最佳 ,南非 -菲律宾 -墨西哥型次之 ,而印度 -中国型最差。比较中国的商业银行监管模式与世界平均水平以及德国和美国的差异 ,结果显示了中国过多的对政府拥有银行和直接的事先监管的依赖。     

Efficiency of labour use in the Swedish banking industry: a stochastic frontier approach

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of the deregulation of the Swedish banking industry in the mid-1980s, and the consequent banking crisis, on productive efficiency and productivity growth in the industry. An unbalanced panel of Swedish banks is studied over the period, 1984 to 1995. A total of 1275 observations are analysed for 156 banks that were observed for between two and twelve years. We adopt a translog stochastic frontier model to estimate the labour-use requirements in terms of the variables, loans, deposits, guarantees, number of branches and total inventories, together with the year of observation. The inefficiency effects in the labour-use frontier are modelled in terms of the number of branches, total inventories, the type of bank and year of observation. The technical inefficiencies of labour use of Swedish banks were found to be significant, with mean inefficiencies per year estimated to be between about 8 and 15 per cent over the years of study. However, the confidence interval predictions for these inefficiencies were found to be quite wide. First version received: August 1998/Final version received: April 2000     

Foreign Banks and Political Sovereignty: The Case of Argentina

Abstract

This paper analyzes a seldom discussed aspect of Argentina's banking crisis of 2001–2002: the conflict that arose between foreign banks and the national government over the economic policies applied in response to the banking crisis. In particular, the paper will examine the foreign banks' strategy to dollarize the economy and to impede the national government's strategy of pesofication.     

Performance of Thailand banks after the 1997 East Asian financial crisis

The performance of commercial banks and government-owned specialized banks in Thailand is estimated after the 1997 East Asian financial crisis. Commercial banks exhibit increasing returns to scale, whereas government-owned specialized banks exhibit decreasing returns to scale, implying further increases in bank size and market concentration in the commercial bank sector but not for government specialized banks. Cost inefficiency varies by bank and is a function of the ratio of nonperforming loans (NPLs) to total loans, equity to total assets and liquid assets to total assets, as well as the number of branches. On average, banks with fewer NPLs, that are well capitalized and with adequate liquidity are efficient. Thus, stricter rules to regulate credit risk management and ensure capital and liquidity adequacy would enhance efficiency in the banking sector. Although estimated input substitutability appears to be low, labour and loanable fund are substitutes. However, labour and physical capital as well as physical and loanable funds are complements in commercial banks. All the three inputs of labour, physical capital and loanable funds are substitutes for the government specialized banks.     

How competitive is the Syrian banking sector? Empirical evidence from ‘pre/post’ war Syria

This paper investigates the degree of market power in the Syrian banking sector over the period 2005–2016 where research on competitive conditions does not exist. The degree of competitiveness is assessed based on the revenue elasticity to input prices approach and is related to a set of market indicators. To test whether the Syrian crisis has altered the competitive conditions over the years of the sample, I divide the full sample into two subsamples, namely the pre-crisis years (2005–2012) and the crisis years (2013–2016). The results suggest that banks in Syria earn their interest and total revenue under conditions of monopoly. I find that the trend of market structure—characterized by a monopoly—in the pre-crisis years continues over crisis years. My findings provide robust evidence that a collusive behaviour among banks is in operation in the banking sector of Syria. The difficult penetration into/exit from the market has led to the existence of a profit-curb mechanism for the Syrian banks, hence, an upward shift in the marginal cost curve will be associated with a reduction in revenue as a result of the optimal condition for these banks which act as monopolists.     

Why don't banks lend to Egypt's private sector?

Bank credit to Egypt's private sector decreased over the last decade, despite a recapitalized banking system and high rates of economic growth. Recent macro-economic turmoil has reinforced the trend. This paper explains the decrease based on credit supply and demand considerations by 1) presenting stylized facts regarding the evolution of the banks' sources and fund use in 2005 to 2011, noting two different cycles of external capital flows, and 2) estimating private credit supply and demand equations using quarterly data from 1998 to 2011. The system of simultaneous equations is estimated both assuming continuous market clearing and allowing for transitory price rigidity entailing market disequilibrium. The main results are robust to the market clearing assumption. During the global financial crisis, a significant capital outflow stalled bank deposit growth, which in turn affected the private sector's credit supply. At the same time, the banking sector increased credit to the government. Both factors reduced the private sector's credit supply during the period under study. After the trough of the global crisis, capital flowed back into Egypt and deposit growth stopped being a drag on the supply side, but bank credit to the government continued to drive the decrease in the private sector's credit supply. Beginning in the final quarter of 2010, capital flows reversed in tandem with global capital markets, and in January 2011 the popular uprising that ousted President Hosni Mubarak added an Egypt-specific shock that accentuated the outflow. Lending capacity dragged again, accounting for 10% of the estimated fall in private credit. Credit to the government continued to drain resources, accounting for 70–80% of the estimated total decline. Reduced economic activity contributed around 15% of the total fall in credit. The relative importance of these factors contrasts with that of the preceding capital inflow period, when credit to the government accounted for 54% of the estimated fall, while demand factors accounted for a similar percentage.     

Public Sector Banks in India: Rationale and Prerequisites for reform

This paper contributes to the debate on public sector banks by suggesting several rationales for government ownership of banks in India. The paper then proceeds to argue that due to high economic costs, the current public sector banking system is unsustainable. Although a policy of wider private ownership was introduced in the 1990s, it is suggested that there are several prerequisites to be met before such a reform can be more fully implemented. It is argued that these prerequisites arise from the rationales for government ownership, and they include a credible bank regulatory regime, and government promotion of co‐operative banks and credit unions.     

The Efficiency of China's Banking Industry and the Determinants

The recent global financial crisis highlights the importance of a sound financial sector for economic development. This paper evaluates the economic efficiency of China's banking industry and investigates the determinants of this efficiency. Our analysis shows that the average economic efficiency of joint-stock commercial banks is highest, followed by the ‘Big Four’ state-owned commercial banks and city commercial banks. The economic inefficiency of these banks during the past 15 years was mainly caused by technical inefficiency, and this technical inefficiency was mainly caused by scale inefficiency. Using the scores of efficiency as dependent variables, the paper also comprehensively studies the impact of (1) the characteristics of individual banks, (2) the characteristics of the whole banking industry and (3) macroeconomic factors on banking efficiency. The results suggest a number of factors that banks can work on to improve efficiency and lend support to deepening reforms in the Chinese banking industry, including regulatory reforms that require capital adequacy in a more strict way, reforms that introduce more competition and, more broadly, reforms that aim at establishing institutions that can truly commercialize Chinese banks. Last but not least, the efficiency of banking depends on healthy growth of the overall economy.     

Dual market competition and deposit rate setting in Islamic and conventional banks

This paper addresses the issue of competition in dual banking markets by analyzing the determinants of deposit rates in Islamic and conventional banks. Using a sample of 20 countries with dual banking systems over the 2000–2014 period, our results show significant differences in the drivers of Islamic and conventional banks' pricing behavior. Conventional banks with stronger market power set lower deposit rates but market power is not significant for Islamic banks. In predominantly Muslim environments, conventional banks set higher deposit rates and further higher when their market power is lower. Whereas conventional banks are influenced by the competitiveness of Islamic banks, Islamic banks are only affected by their peers in predominantly Muslim countries. Our findings have important implications regarding competition and bank stability in dual banking markets.     

Credit Risk Determinants for the Bulgarian Banking System

Using an autoregressive distributed lag model, this paper examines the factors that influence the credit risk of the Bulgarian banking system over the decade 2001–2010, as measured by non-performing loans. Recent papers aim to identify the determinants of non-performing loans using a cross-country modelling framework. As the South East European region (SEE) is non-homogeneous, our analysis is country-specific and captures the timeline between the bank privatisation era up to the global financial crisis and the ensuing Greek crisis. The contribution of our paper is twofold: it uses the ARDL modelling framework that is scarcely employed in related studies but also investigates spillover effects from the Greek crisis in view of the material presence of Greek banks in Bulgaria. In accordance with previous studies, the findings suggest that the credit risk determinants of Bulgarian banks should be sought endogenously in macroeconomic variables and industry-specific factors but also in exogenous factors. We evidence a pronounced role of the global financial crisis and the country’s bank regulatory framework. The Greek debt crisis appears to play an immaterial role indicating that Greek banks have not been a Trojan horse in the Bulgarian banking system.     

Did the global financial crisis alter the competitive conditions in the Indian banking industry?

This article addresses a pertinent research question: Did the global financial crisis alter the competitive conditions in the Indian banking industry? In order to find the answer of this research question, we applied a dynamic version of the non-structural Panzar-Rosse model on a unique unbalanced panel dataset of Indian banks spanning over the period from 1998/99 to 2015/16. The robust estimates of H-statistic computed on the basis of the generalized method of moments estimates of the elasticities of input prices show that (i) Indian banks earned their interest and total revenue under monopolistic competition throughout the whole of the sample period and (ii) the global financial crisis altered the competitive conditions in the banking industry, and market moved closer to perfect competition following the financial crisis, especially when interest-bearing activities were in focus.     

Measuring and explaining the efficiencies of the United Arab Emirates banking system

Using newly collected data from a survey distributed to all banks in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), this article measures economic efficiency in the banking industry, namely allocative, technical, pure technical and scale efficiency. Employing a nonparametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach, the study estimates the efficiency for a cross section of the UAE banks in 2004. The results indicate that the dominant source of inefficiency in the UAE banking is stemming from allocative inefficiency rather than technical inefficiency. Furthermore, the main source of the relatively small size, technical inefficiency in the UAE banking industry is not the scale inefficiency but rather pure technical inefficiency. The results further indicate that the UAE banks are able to use their input resources more efficiently when they have more branches, and that newer banks are performing better than older banks on average. Moreover, the results also show that short experiences of employees affect efficiencies negatively and government ownership tends to reduce efficiency (as the government shares increase in the bank, the efficiency scores get lower). Finally, the most interesting results have to do with finding higher average efficiencies in banks that employ more women, more managers and less national citizens of the UAE.     

The Public Duties and Social Responsibilities of Big British Banks

The implicit social compact between the big British banks and the U.K. government broke down in the 1980s. Since then, the banks have sought to maximize shareholder value by closing less profitable branches, thereby reducing access to finance and increasing risk taking. Post-1990, the big banks also substantially increased their dependency on wholesale funding and dramatically reduced their liquid asset holdings, which increased their leverage and risk exposure. The U.K. government’s response to the financial crisis was to encourage mergers between banks, increasing concentration in the industry. The government bail-outs allowed the big banks to enjoy free insurance paid by taxpayers. The establishment of an autonomous retail banking (and insurance) utility regulator and a system for taxing the big banks fairly is recommended.     

ASSESSING DAMAGES: THE 1983 ISRAELI BANK SHARES CRISIS

In 1983, Israeli bank shares collapsed following several years during which the banks had actively intervened to promote share prices and thereby contributed to a 300% rise in real terms. During the crisis the government assumed control of the banks, which they did not begin to sell back to the public until 1993. We compare 1993 bank share prices after the banks were partially relisted on the Stock Exchange with 1983 precrisis values. The 1993 time-adjusted market values were $10 billion lower than in 1983, a decline borne by precrisis shareholders ($4 billion) and by taxpayers ($6 billion). Of this latter amount, two-thirds represents a transfer from the government to shareholders, while approximately one-third represents an efficiency loss - and hence a direct cost - resulting from government ownership of the banks for 10 years following the crisis. The results highlight the risk inherent in a banking system that is both concentrated and universal and illustrates the costs associated with sustained government ownership.     

美英德日银行公司治理比较

本文通过对美英德日银行公司治理的比较，发现治理的目标的一致性，即通过发挥管理和监督功能，来实现公司价值的最大化或股东价值的最大化。但由于法律制度、资本市场、政治体制的差异，各国银行公司治理结构模式又不尽相同。本文试图在进行比较研究的基础上，为我国银行改善公司治理提供启示和借鉴。     

Did foreign banks stay committed to emerging Europe during recent financial crises?

Our objective is to investigate empirically the behavior of foreign banks with respect to real loan growth during periods of financial crisis for a set of countries in which foreign banks dominate the banking sectors due primarily to having taken over large existing former state-owned banks. The eight countries are among the most developed in emerging Europe, their banking sectors having been modernized by the middle of the last decade. We consider a data period that includes an initial credit boom (2005 – 2007) followed by the global financial crisis (2008 & 2009) and the onset of the Eurozone crisis (2010). Our two innovations with respect to the existing literature on banking during the financial crisis are to separate foreign banks into two categories, namely, subsidiaries of the Big 6 European multinational banks (MNBs) and all other foreign-controlled banks, and to take account of the impact of exchange rates during the period. Our results show that bank lending was impacted adversely by both crises but that the two types of foreign banks behaved differently. The Big 6 banks remained committed to the region in that their lending behavior was not different from that of domestic banks supporting the notion that these countries are treated as a “second home market” by these European MNBs. Contrariwise, the other foreign banks active in the region were involved in fueling the credit boom but then decreased their lending aggressively during the crisis periods. Our results also indicate that bank behavior in countries having flexible exchange rate regimes differs from that in those in (or effectively in) the Eurozone. Our results suggest that both innovations matter for studying bank behavior during crisis periods in the region and, by extension, to other small countries in which banking sectors are dominated by foreign financial institutions having different business models.     

当前中国银行业面临的风险分析与判断

本文借鉴银行危机发生机理,对比分析了当前我国经济运行状态和银行风险因素,对当前中国银行业面临的风险程度进行了深入分析判断。本文认为,中国未来一段时间爆发系统性银行危机的可能性不大,但当前确实存在一些深度的风险因素,需要中国银行业引起重视与关注并采取措施积极应对,并针对性的提出了一些措施建议。     

政府注资银行政策:基于政府决策内生化的分析

在全球金融危机中,政府注资银行作为各国救助银行的重要手段成为学术焦点之一。本文借鉴了Shleifer and Vishny(1998)的政府决策模型,构造了政府注资银行的福利函数以决定最优注资额度,从而将政府注资额度内生化;同时,本文在银行寡头垄断模型的范式下将政府、银行和企业部门三者纳入博弈框架,揭示政府选择不同的注资银行政策对银行业所产生的影响。对1991—2002年间日本银行系统性危机所进行的数值模拟结果表明日本1999年3月的注资对存贷款市场的影响具有两面性,同时也揭示了政府最优注资额度及其对银行贷款边际利润和存款边际成本的影响。在此基础上,本文提出了惩罚性的注资银行措施可以遏制银行存贷款市场的逆向选择问题等政策主张。     

Too-Big-To-Fail: Why Megabanks Have Not Become Smaller Since the Global Financial Crisis?

ABSTRACT

More than ten years after the global financial crisis, what has happened to the ‘too-big-to-fail’ (TBTF) banks whose reckless behavior was among its preconditions, but which received public support and guarantees in the midst of that crisis? Insofar as this too-big-to-fail status helped create the crisis and then imposed costs on the rest of society, we would expect these banks to have shrunk. We investigate the evolution of 31 global-TBTF banks and find that their overall size has hardly recorded any substantial change. However, there is no sense of urgency in the flourishing post-crisis literature on TBTF banks about the need to contain their size; the prevalent view therein is that if properly regulated, the risks that arise from a financial system dominated by TBTF banks are manageable. This view rests on the same overly narrow theoretical underpinnings whose flaws were exposed in the crisis. We argue that too-big-to-fail banking is embedded in a set of self-reinforcing policies—consolidation, balance-sheet support through quantitative easing, favorable regulations, bank lobbying, and geo-economic and geo-political considerations—which explain why these banks have not shrunk and why they remain a threat to financial stability, well after the lessons of the crisis should have been learned.