Taming Systemically Important Financial Institutions

We model a systemically important financial institution that is too big (or too interconnected) to fail. Without credible regulation and strong supervision, the shareholders of this institution might deliberately let its managers take excessive risk. We propose a solution to this problem, showing how insurance against systemic shocks can be provided without generating moral hazard. The solution involves levying a systemic tax needed to cover the costs of future crises and more importantly establishing a systemic risk authority endowed with special resolution powers, including the control of bankers’ compensation packages during crisis periods.     

The cost of firms’ debt financing and the global financial crisis

We provide an assessment of the determinants of the risk premium paid by non-financial corporations on long-term bonds. By looking at 5500 issues over the period 2005–2012, we find that in recent years the sovereign debt market turbulence has been a major driver of corporate risk. Compared with the three-year period 2005–2007 before the global financial crisis, in the years 2010–2012 Italian, Spanish and Portuguese firms paid on average between 70 and 120 basis points of additional premium due to the negative spillovers from the sovereign debt crisis, while German firms received a discount of 40 basis points.     

Who said large banks don’t experience scale economies? Evidence from a risk-return-driven cost function

The Great Recession focused attention on large financial institutions and systemic risk. We investigate whether large size provides any cost advantages to the economy and, if so, whether these cost advantages are due to technological scale economies or too-big-to-fail subsidies. Estimating scale economies is made more complex by risk-taking. Better diversification resulting from larger scale generates scale economies but also incentives to take more risk. When this additional risk-taking adds to cost, it can obscure the underlying scale economies and engender misleading econometric estimates of them. Using data pre- and post-crisis, we estimate scale economies using two production models. The standard model ignores endogenous risk-taking and finds little evidence of scale economies. The model accounting for managerial risk preferences and endogenous risk-taking finds large scale economies, which are not driven by too-big-to-fail considerations. We evaluate the costs and competitive implications of breaking up the largest banks into smaller banks.     

The Effect of Credit Risk on Bank and Bank Holding Company Bond Yields: Evidence from the Post-FDICIA Period

In this article we examine whether the federal safety net is viewed by the market as being extended beyond de jure deposits to other bank debt and even the debt of bank holding companies (BHCs). We extend previous research by focusing on the post‐FDICIA period and by examining the risk‐return relation of bonds issued directly by banks, not BHCs. Our results provide evidence that both bank and BHC bonds are priced by the secondary market in relation to their underlying credit risk, particularly for less capitalized issuers, suggesting that proposals requiring banks to issue subordinated debt may enhance market monitoring and discipline and be useful in supplementing regulatory discipline.     

Valuation of insurers’ contingent capital with counterparty risk and price endogeneity

This study develops a structural framework to value insurers’ contingent capital with counterparty risk (CR) and overcomes the problem of price endogeneity (PE) in the valuation model. Our results on the focal contingent capital instrument – catastrophe equity put option (CatEPut) – indicate that prices can be significantly overestimated without considering CR and be significantly underestimated without considering PE. This study also examines how CatEPuts affect the buyer’s probability of default (PD). Our results show that buying a CatEPut lowers the PD for high-risk insurers, but not necessarily so for low-risk insurers; however, without taking CR and PE into account, one may significantly overestimate the credit enhancement provided by the CatEPuts.     

Can We Prove a Bank Guilty of Creating Systemic Risk? A Minority Report

Because increasing a bank's capital requirement to improve the stability of the financial system imposes costs upon the bank, a regulator should ideally be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that banks classified as systemically risky really do create systemic risk before subjecting them to this capital punishment. Evaluating the performance of two leading systemic risk models, we show that estimation error alone prevents the reliable identification of the most systemically risky banks. We conclude that it will be a considerable challenge to develop a riskometer that is sound and reliable enough to provide an adequate foundation for macroprudential policy.     

Concentrated control,institutions, and banking sector: An international study

Using a broad sample of listed commercial banks in East Asia and Western Europe, this paper investigates the relations among concentrated control, a set of bank operating characteristics, and legal and regulatory regimes. We find that banks with concentrated control exhibit poorer performance, lower cost efficiency, greater return volatility, and higher insolvency risk, relative to widely held ones. We also document that legal institutions and private monitoring effectively reduce the detrimental effects of concentrated control and that official disciplinary power plays a weak governance role, whereas government intervention exacerbates the adverse effects. Further evidence shows that the relations between control concentration and bank operating characteristics are curvilinear and vary according to the types of controlling owners. Overall, our findings support the contention that country-level institutions play important roles in constraining insider expropriation, and that private monitoring mechanisms are more effective than are public rules and supervision in governing banks.     

系统重要性金融机构的国际监管趋势浅析

系统重要性金融机构的监管已经成为当前国际金融改革的一个重要组成部分。国际金融组织和各国金融监管机构正致力于降低其道德风险,终结大型金融机构“过大而不能倒”的局面。我国的监管需要从中国的国情和实际出发,不断完善宏观审慎管理框架,建立健全金融基础设施,积极参与国际游戏规则的制定,为防范系统性风险和维护金融稳定做出不懈努力。     

Too big to fail in banking: What does it mean?

Interest in too big to fail (TBTF) resolutions of insolvent large complex financial firms has intensified in recent years. TBTF resolutions protect some in-the-money counterparties of a targeted insolvent firm from losses that they would suffer if the usual bankruptcy resolution regimes used in resolving other firms in the industry were applied. Although special TBTF resolution regimes may reduce the collateral spill-over costs of the failure, the combined direct and indirect costs from such “bailouts” may be large and often financed in part or in total by taxpayers. Thus, TBTF has become a major public policy issue that has not been resolved in part because of disagreements about definitions and thereby the estimates of the benefits and costs. This paper explores these differences and develops a framework for standardizing the definitions and evaluating the desirability of TBTF resolutions more accurately.