An empirical note on the impact of federal deposit insurance on bank failures in the U.S.

This study empirically examines the impact of federal deposit insurance coverage on the failure rate of commercial banks in the U.S. over the 1963–91 period. The analysis allows for the potential bank failure rate impact of the growth rate of real GDP, the real prime lending rate, the real cost of funds, and the commercial bank tangible capital-to-asset ratio, while measuring federal deposit insurance coverage as the percentage of deposits at federally insured banks that was covered by federal deposit insurance. The instrumental variables' estimates indicate that the greater the extent of federal deposit insurance coverage, the higher the bank failure rate.     

THE HYBRID PLAN: A PROPOSAL FOR FEDERAL CREDIT REFORM

Federal credit subsidies are one of the largest areas of government activity. However, the Unified Budget treats lending in a highly misleading manner, and federal credit management is inconsistent and deceptive. These oversights have contributed to both the rapid rise of federal lending and the financial crises facing several credit agencies during recent years. Credit reform is a vital issue both to protect the government's huge financial stake and to ensure the success of credit programs.
This paper critiques previous proposals for credit reform–each suffering from major implementation problems–and suggests an alternative. The Hybrid Plan combines aspects of earlier proposals and eliminates several disadvantages of each. One could implement the Hybrid Plan under current conditions, but it also is consistent with further improvement in federal credit management.     

Global banking and the conduct of macroprudential policy in a monetary union

This paper questions the role of cross-border lending in the definition of national macroprudential policies in the European Monetary Union. We build and estimate a two-country DSGE model with corporate and interbank cross-border loans, Core-Periphery diverging financial cycles and a national implementation of coordinated macroprudential measures based on Countercyclical Capital Buffers. We get three main results. First, targeting a national credit-to-GDP ratio should be favored to federal averages as this rule induces better stabilizing performances in front of important divergences in credit cycles between core and peripheral countries. Second, policies reacting to the evolution of national credit supply should be favored as the transmission channel of macroprudential policy directly impacts the marginal cost of loan production and, by so, financial intermediaries. Third, the interest of lifting up macroprudential policymaking to the supra-national level remains questionable for admissible value of international lending between Eurozone countries. Indeed, national capital buffers reacting to the union-wide loan-to-GDP ratio only lead to the same stabilization results than the one obtained under the national reaction if cross-border lending reaches 45%. However, even if cross-border linkages are high enough to justify the implementation of a federal adjusted solution, the reaction to national lending conditions remains remarkably optimal.     

Assessing the effectiveness of monetary policy in Kenya: Evidence from a macroeconomic model

This paper examines the effectiveness of monetary policy in Kenya based on policy simulations from a structural macroeconometric model. The analysis is conducted using the policy rate, i.e. the central bank rate (CBR) and the cash reserve ratio (CRR) with respect to the interest rate and bank lending channels, respectively. The results indicate that whereas a change in the policy rate is effective in influencing short term rates, the long term lending rates respond marginally. Consequently, the transmission to the real economy and the overall impact on inflation is minimal. However, a change in CBR has a comparatively higher impact on inflation while a change in CRR has a relatively larger impact on aggregate demand. Enhancing the effectiveness of the CBR and strengthening of the interest rate channel have the potential of anchoring inflation expectations and boosting the effectiveness of monetary policy in Kenya.     

The relationship among money supply, banking lending and aggregate demand in China: 1994–2006

Based on the framework of Bernanke & Blinader (1988) and Walsh (2003), this paper provides a concise analysis for relationship among money supply, banking lending and aggregate demand; and makes an empirical test on relationship among China’s money supply, banking lending and aggregate demand from 1994 to 2006 by adopting the single-equation regressive model and vector autoregressive model in terms of Keynesian structural model and monetarism simplified model. The result shows that money supply and banking lending have both played a driving role on real economy. Because of non-market interest rates, Keynesian structural model cannot explain the transmission mechanism of China monetary policies better than monetarism simplified model. __________ Translated from Jingji kexue 经济科学 (Economic Science), 2008, (1): 5–15     

The interbank market during a crisis

The autumn of 1998 provides a setting in which to test the performance of the interbank market during a potential financial crisis. This period witnessed Russia's effective default on its sovereign bonds and the near collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management. Despite these negative shocks to bank capital and increased uncertainty in financial markets, the federal funds market still effectively channeled liquidity to those institutions in need at rates consistent with Federal Reserve intentions. Further, risk premiums on overnight lending were largely unaffected and lending volumes increased, suggesting that the federal funds market performed well during this period.     

A cause for policy concern: the expansion of household credit in middle-income economies

This article discusses the significance of the recent growth in household credit across a range of middle-income economies. This growth is understood primarily as a result of policy, including the promotion of individual borrowing as a means to fund access to housing, education and health. A formal model of credit extension and allocation is developed, establishing that consumption lending makes a comparatively stronger contribution to aggregate profitability as well as financial fragility than production lending. Consumption lending may be understood to create distinctive endogenous tendencies to credit-market instability. The findings point to the need for a critical reconsideration of reliance on this lending for social and macroeconomic policy.     

EQUILIBRIUM LENDING MECHANISM AND AGGREGATE ACTIVITY*

We construct a model of the credit market where financial contracting is subject to costly state verification and moral hazard. The economy's aggregate activity and its equilibrium lending mechanism are determined jointly. We analyze how changes in the model's exogenous variables, including the returns of the economy's investment projects and the supply of loans, affect the economy's aggregate output and the types of the credit through which investment is funded.     

Monetary policy and bank lending in a low interest rate environment: Diminishing effectiveness?

This paper analyses the effectiveness of monetary policy on bank lending in a low interest rate environment. Based on a sample of 108 large international banks, our empirical analysis suggests that monetary policy is less effective in stimulating bank lending growth when interest rates reach a very low level. This result holds after controlling for business and financial cycle conditions and different bank-specific characteristics such as liquidity, capitalisation, funding costs, bank risk and income diversification. We find that the impact of low rates on the profitability of banks’ traditional intermediation activity helps explain the subdued evolution of lending in the period 2010–14.     

The interaction between macroprudential policy and monetary policy: Overview

This paper presents the main findings of an International Banking Research Network initiative examining the interaction between monetary policy and macroprudential policy in determining international bank lending. We give an overview on the data, empirical specifications and results of the seven papers from the initiative. The papers are from a range of core and smaller advanced economies, and emerging markets . The main findings are as follows. First, there is evidence that macroprudential policy in recipient countries can partly offset the spillover effects of monetary policy conducted in core countries. Meanwhile, domestic macroprudential policy in core countries can also affect the cross‐border transmission of domestic monetary policy via lending abroad, by limiting the increase in lending by less strongly capitalized banks. Second, the findings highlight that studying heterogeneities across banks provides complementary insights to studies using more aggregate data and focusing on average effects. In particular, we find that individual bank characteristics such as bank size or GSIB status play a first‐order role in the transmission of these policies. Finally, the impacts differ considerably across prudential policy instruments, which also suggests the importance of more granular analysis.     

Is the Lending Channel of Monetary Policy Dominant in Australia?

The transmission process of monetary policy is a longstanding macroeconomic issue. The lending view is that a monetary tightening affects aggregate demand by shifting the supply schedule of bank loans left. The contraction of bank loans does not necessarily mean a shift of the supply schedule. Therefore, testing the lending view requires the identification of the shifts of the demand and supply schedules in the bank loan market. This paper employs an original approach, finding that the lending channel is not dominant in Australia. The paper also examines features of Australian banks' behaviour which make the lending channel less dominant.     

Financial globalization and its consequences for productive government expenditure

This paper employs a stochastic growth model to study the impact of international financial liberalization on the share of productive government expenditure in GDP. Financial liberalization is specified to take the form of reducing the costs of both lending to, and borrowing from, abroad. This is shown to impinge on the economy through (i) its interaction with the volatility of returns to domestic capital, and (ii) the impact on agents’ allocation of their portfolio across domestic and foreign assets, and its effect on domestic activity. Reduced foreign lending costs tend to divert resources from the domestic economy, requiring the government to compensate by increasing the share of domestic output allocated to productive activity. Reducing borrowing costs have the opposite effects. Empirical evidence, using a dataset of 97 countries over the period 1970 to 2015 provides convincing support for these findings and the underlying mechanism.     

Business cycle and bank lending procyclicality in a dual banking system

The paper studies bank lending behaviour over the business cycle in a dual banking system, Malaysia, with the objective of ascertaining whether Islamic banks have a role in stabilizing credit. The study makes use of unbalanced panel data of 21 conventional banks and 16 Islamic banks covering mostly the period 2001–2013. Applying dynamic GMM estimators, we find the aggregate loans by banks to be pro-cyclical in conformity with existing studies. However, when we segregate the lending/financing behaviour of conventional and Islamic banks, the cyclicality of bank lending seems to be true only for conventional banks. As for the Islamic banks, the business cycle does not seem to affect their financing decisions. Indeed, there is indication that the Islamic banks in general and the full-fledged Islamic banks in particular can even be counter-cyclical in their financing decisions. This conclusion is fairly robust to a different loan measure, alternative model specifications, and to an alternative business cycle measure. Hence, our results provide further support to the “stability” view of the Islamic banks in that they have the ability to stabilize credit.     

Bargaining over loan contracts with signaling

This paper combines a sequential bargaining game between an enterprise and a fixed number of banks with a signaling game through which the enterprise reveals her project quality as well as her market-speed on the lending market. We characterize subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium loan contracts that are supported by separating perfect Bayesian equilibria in the signaling game. In contrast to existing models of lending markets, low-quality investment projects might be rewarded with more favorable equilibrium loan contracts than high-quality projects. Also in contrast to existing models, an increase in the competitive pressure between banks reduces the aggregate welfare in our model. The reason is that more favorable loan conditions come with a greater incentive for the ‘strong’ entrepreneur to distinguish herself from her ‘weak’ counterpart through socially wasteful signaling costs.     

Large lending and banks performance. Is there any relationship? Empirical evidence from US banks

Large lending in the banking industry has sparked concerns about banks’ efficiency performance, particularly, if it is related to their credit risk, as trade credit, provided by large, creditworthy firms. We provide evidence of a rather neglected issue regarding the impact of large lending on banks’ efficiency using cost and profit stochastic functions. A unique dataset was constructed concerning all US banks collected from the Statistics on Depository Institutions report compiled by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Our sample contains US banks tracked yearly for the period 2010–2017, creating an unbalanced panel of year observations. An econometric framework based on nested non-neutral frontiers was developed to estimate the influence and the decomposition of large lending on the three banks’ performance aspects. Moreover, different types of frontiers aiming at the cost and profit sides have been investigated, and the associated elasticities have been calculated. We notice that large lending plays a crucial role in banks’ technical efficiency. Variations among different frontier models, type of bank and size, banks’ ownership structure, and macroeconomic conditions appear to be present. By considering all capital adequacy asset quality management earnings liquidity parameters, we notice that banks’ financial strength affects banks’ efficiency.     

Information sharing and the volume of private credit in transition: Evidence from Ukrainian bank-level panel data

The effect of lenders' information sharing on the volume of credit is ambiguous in theory and underexplored empirically. Departing from the scant existing literature, which draws on country-level aggregate data, we study the impact of information sharing on the volume of private credit by examining unique bank-level panel data from Ukraine, a transition economy where information sharing among banks is only a recent phenomenon. Employing the fixed-effects framework and dynamic panel methods to address endogeneity due to the non-exogenous nature of banks' choice to participate in information sharing, we find no credit volume effect of information sharing when information sharing takes place through the central bank-administered public credit registry. In contrast, information sharing through private credit bureaus is associated with an increase in the volume of bank lending, in particular when a bank is partner of multiple private credit bureaus. This effect is robust and non-negligible in magnitude.     

Macroeconomic Fluctuations and Bank Lending: Evidence for Germany and the Euro Area

Abstract. This paper analyzes the dynamic response of loans to the private sector and of economic activity to aggregate supply, demand and monetary policy shocks in Germany and the euro area based on a standard macroeconomic VAR using sign restrictions to identify the structural shocks. The main results of this analysis are that (i) with the exception of the response to the supply shock in Germany, the response of loans to the three macroeconomic shocks is rather weak and in most cases insignificant; (ii) the 2000–05 credit slowdown and weak economic performance in Germany were primarily driven by adverse supply shocks; and (iii) the marked slowdown in credit creation in Germany over this period actually represents a realignment of the outstanding stock of loans with its deterministic level. In order to assess the role of bank lending in the transmission of macroeconomic shocks, we further perform counterfactual simulations and analyze the dynamic responses of German loan subaggregates in order to test the distributional implications of potential credit market frictions. These exercises do not indicate that credit market frictions play an amplifying role in the transmission of macroeconomic fluctuations.     

Macroprudential policy and the inward transmission of monetary policy: The case of Chile,Mexico, and Russia

This paper studies whether domestic macroprudential policy may attenuate the inward transmission of monetary policy shocks from the United States to domestic bank lending growth in three emerging market economies—Chile, Mexico, and Russia. Identification relies on banks’ heterogeneous exposure to prudential policies and the fact that foreign monetary policy shocks are exogenous from the perspective of these economies. After analyzing the effects of the aggregate domestic prudential policy stance, we focus on specific prudential policies targeting mortgage and consumer loans, as well as foreign‐currency deposits. Although our overall results are mixed, we find evidence that the strength of international monetary policy spillovers varies depending on the stance of domestic macroprudential policy. In particular, a tighter reserve requirement stance over foreign‐currency deposits in Chile dampens the effect of an international monetary policy shock on domestic local‐currency lending, but reinforces that on foreign‐currency lending, whereas in Russia, it dampens the effect on both local‐currency and foreign‐currency lending, although to different degrees. Prudential policies targeting the asset side of banks’ balance sheets, such as mortgage loans or consumer credit, are found to amplify international monetary policy spillovers in some cases and attenuate it in others, depending on the country context.     

FEDERAL MEDICAID ASSISTANCE TO STATES: IMPACT ON PRENATAL CARE

In the context of dramatically increasing U.S. health-care costs, this paper contributes to an ongoing debate discussing proposals to replace the government's current policy of matching state Medicaid spending with a block grant system. State-level panel data analysis provides evidence that, ceteris paribus, increasing the federal matching formula has a negative impact on prenatal care. This aggregate result masks significant differences between high- and low-spending states and appears to be driven by the high-spending states thus implying that a 2-track approach to Medicaid funding may be more appropriate than the current system. ( JEL I1, H7)