Leverage and investment under a state-owned bank lending environment: Evidence from China

This study examines the relations between leverage and investment in China's listed firms, where corporate debt is principally provided by state-owned banks. We obtain three major findings. First, there is a negative relation between leverage and investment. Second, the negative relation between leverage and investment is weaker in firms with low growth opportunities and poor operating performance than in firms with high growth opportunities and good operating performance. Third, the negative relation between leverage and investment is weaker in firms with a higher level of state shareholding than in firms with a lower level of state shareholding. Overall, our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the state-owned banks in China impose fewer restrictions on the capital expenditures of low growth and poorly performing firms and also firms with greater state ownership. This creates an overinvestment bias in these firms.     

The economic effects of foreign bank presence: Evidence from the Philippines

This study examines the economic effects of the liberalization of foreign bank entry in the Philippines from 1990 to 2006. The findings provide strong evidence on the dominance of competition effects from foreign bank presence which lead to the reduction in the profitability and overhead costs of domestic commercial banks. These findings, which reveal that both the actual market penetration and mere presence of foreign banks seem to exert competitive pressure to domestic banks, imply that foreign banks may serve as an effective competitive force, reducing the excess profits earned by domestic banks and compelling domestic banks to update their production technologies and techniques to improve their cost efficiency.From a policy perspective, the findings on competition effects of foreign banks in the domestic banking system justify the liberalization of foreign bank entry in the Philippines. The main findings demonstrate that the goal of banking liberalization in transforming domestic banks to be more competitive and efficient works considerably well in the case of the Philippines. Aside from the policy of easing the entry of foreign banks, bank-specific conditions can have significant impact on the performance of domestic banks. Therefore, a sustained improvement in the efficiency of domestic commercial banks requires not only liberalizing the entry of foreign banks, but also on continued strengthening of domestic prudential regulation and supervision on the commercial banking system.     

Foreign bank penetration and the lending channel in emerging economies: Evidence from bank-level panel data

This paper examines the main implications of recently increasing foreign bank penetration on bank lending as a channel of monetary policy transmission in emerging economies. Using a dynamic panel model of loan growth, we investigate the loan granting behavior of 1273 banks in the emerging economies of Asia, Latin America, and Central and Eastern Europe during the period from 1996 to 2003. Applying the pooled OLS, system GMM, and panel VAR estimators, we find consistent evidence that foreign banks are less responsive to monetary shocks in host countries, as they adjust their outstanding loan portfolios and interest rates to a lesser extent than domestic private banks, independent of their liquidity, capitalization, size, efficiency, and credit risk, and although there exists a bank lending channel in the emerging economies, it is declining in strength due to the increased level of foreign bank penetration. We also explore possible driving factors for the different responses of foreign and domestic banks to monetary policy shocks by investigating foreign banks’ different behavior during banking crises and tranquil periods, the effects of mode of entry to host countries, the home-country effects, and the response of foreign banks from OECD countries vs. all foreign countries including non-OECD countries. We suggest the access of foreign banks to funding from parent banks through internal capital markets as the most convincing explanation.     

Greasing the wheels of bank lending: Evidence from private firms in China

Bribery, rather than firm performance, largely determines the extent to which private firms access bank credit in China. Bribery enables an economic outcome whereby firms with better economic performance are awarded larger loans. These firms also pay more in terms of bribes. Although satisfactory firm performance does determine whether firms can access loans, it does so only for loans originated by the big-four banks. For loans originated by smaller banks, performance is not essential for firms to secure loan access. Our evidence sheds light on the surprising finding of earlier studies that Chinese banks use commercial logic in their lending practices despite being endowed with a weak institutional framework.     

Basel II and bank lending to emerging markets: Evidence from the German banking sector

This paper investigates whether the new Basel Accord will induce a change in bank lending to emerging markets using a comprehensive new data set on German banks’ foreign exposure. We test two interlinked hypotheses on the conditions under which the change in the regulatory capital would leave lending flows unaffected. This would be the case if (i) the new regulatory capital requirement remains below the economic capital and (ii) banks’ economic capital to emerging markets already adequately reflects risk. On both accounts the evidence indicates that the new Basel Accord should have a limited effect on lending to emerging markets.     

Uncertainty and currency crises: Evidence from survey data

How does uncertainty about fundamentals affect speculation in the foreign exchange markets? This paper studies empirically the role of uncertainty in currency crises. Uncertainty, which is measured using the dispersion of survey forecasts of key macroeconomic variables, is found to have a non-monotonic effect on exchange rate pressures: it heightens speculative pressures when expected fundamentals are good and eases them when they are bad. This prediction is consistent with a broad class of currency crisis theories, ranging from first-generation to global-game models. The proposed empirical strategy remains valid in the presence of forecasters with strategic objectives and addresses potential endogeneity bias by building a novel set of instrumental variables.     

The determinants of interest margins and their effect on bank diversification: Evidence from Asian banks

An endogenous switching regression model is employed for this study, categorizing the banks into regimes of high and low degrees of diversification, with our results indicating that net interest margins can be less sensitive to fluctuations in bank risk factors for functionally diversified banks as compared to more specialized banks. In turn, this implies that by diversifying their income sources, these banks can reduce the shocks to net interest margins arising from idiosyncratic risk. Our results show that prior findings can hold when the banks are located in a regime with a low degree of diversification.     

Bank incentives and suboptimal lending decisions: Evidence from the valuation effect of bank loan announcements in Japan

Using a sample of bank loan announcements in Japan, we examine whether or not banks have incentives to engage in suboptimal lending that results in wealth transfer from the banks to the borrowing firms. We find that abnormal returns for borrowing firms are significantly positive, but those for lending banks are sometimes significantly negative. Furthermore, the announcement returns for borrowing firms are negatively related to those for lending banks, especially when poorly performing firms borrow from financially healthy (low-risk) banks. Our results suggest that the positive valuation effect of bank loan announcements for borrowing firms is mainly due to a wealth transfer from lending banks.     

How the Subprime Crisis went global: Evidence from bank credit default swap spreads

How did the Subprime Crisis, a problem in a small corner of U.S. financial markets, affect the entire global banking system? To shed light on this question we use principal components analysis to identify common factors in the movement of banks' credit default swap spreads. We find that fortunes of international banks rise and fall together even in normal times along with short-term global economic prospects. But the importance of common factors rose steadily to exceptional levels from the outbreak of the Subprime Crisis to past the rescue of Bear Stearns, reflecting a diffuse sense that funding and credit risk was increasing. Following the failure of Lehman Brothers, the interdependencies briefly increased to a new high, before they fell back to the pre-Lehman elevated levels – but now they more clearly reflected heightened funding and counterparty risk. After Lehman's failure, the prospect of global recession became imminent, auguring the further deterioration of banks' loan portfolios. At this point the entire global financial system had become infected.     

Herd behavior in the Japanese loan market: Evidence from bank panel data

This paper investigates whether Japanese banks had been following herd behavior in the domestic loan market from 1975 through 2000. Applying the technique developed by Lakonishok, Shleifer, and Vishny [Lakonishok, J., Shleifer, A., Vishny, R.V., 1992. The impact of institutional trading on stock prices, J. Finan. Econ. 32, 23–43] to the data from loans outstanding to different types of borrowers, we obtain evidence indicative of the existence of herding. City banks in Japan had been following a cyclical pattern of herding with one of the peaks around the bubble period in the late 1980s. Adjusting further for herding resulting from rational behavior, evidence indicative of the existence of irrational herding was observed only in the bubble period. Our estimate indicates that a total of some 5 trillion yen of loan increase by city banks during the period of 1987–1989 can be attributed to irrational herd behavior. The results imply that irrational bank behavior in the late 1980s might have contributed to the problems Japanese banks had with non-performing loans. We also obtained evidence for herding among regional banks and among geographically proximate banks.     

The long-term effects of bank recapitalization: Evidence from Indonesia

Do government-sponsored bank recapitalization programs spur lending and reduce risk? This paper assesses the impact of Indonesia’s bank recapitalization program on lending and bank risk following the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Using unique bank-level data, difference-in-differences estimates suggest that recapitalization increased lending (and more so for larger banks), but also boosted bank risk in the long term. Results remain robust to considerations of (1) bank-level differences in political connections, business group affiliation, ownership type, and (2) changes in macroeconomic conditions, capital requirements, accounting regulations, and public credit registry availability.     

The sensitivity of bank stock returns to real estate

According to the Federal Reserve Board, banking firms have recently been shifting significantly larger portions of their loan portfolios into real estate. This increase in real estate lending has caused concern about the continuing economic health of banks on the part of state and federal regulators, since changes in real estate returns, evidenced by changes in property value, can potentially have a significant impact on bank default risk and profit-ability. However, concerned parties do not seem to have explicitly considered the relationship between mortgage default risk and the specific characteristics of real estate investments.This study examines the sensitivities of stock returns for different bank groups, based on the percentage of total loans in real estate and the percentage of loans in five different mortgage categories (construction and development loans, farmland loans, one- to four-family residential loans, multifamily residential loans, and nonresidential and nonfarm loans), to changes in real estate market returns. This is done by developing and using a three-index model.The results of this study indicate that bank stocks, overall, are very sensitive to changes in real estae returns. Banks, with a larger portion of their total loans invested in all types of real estate loans, except farmland loans, are most sensitive to changes in real estate returns.     

The effectiveness of the auditor's going-concern evaluation as an external governance mechanism: Evidence from loan defaults

When there is significant doubt about a firm's ability to continue as a going concern, professional standards require independent auditors to disclose the uncertainty in their report. This study assesses the influence of the independent auditor's going-concern evaluation by examining default following the release of the auditor's report. We use a proprietary sample maintained by the Portuguese Central Bank on 12,199 audit reports relating to approximately 2000 firms that are liable by law to have their accounts audited on an annual basis. Empirical estimation of a logit model controlling for accounting cash- flow-related and nonaccounting variables shows that the likelihood of default for firms that received going concern opinion is 2.792 times that of firms that received a clean opinion. Likelihood ratio tests for omitted variable also confirm the incremental predictive ability of going-concern opinion over and above accounting and nonaccounting variables for the estimation and hold-out samples. In the nondefaulting group, the average default rate is 6.05%, in the defaulting group it is 17.78%. The default rate for firms in the nondefaulting group that received a going-concern opinion is 9.92% and for firms that received a clean opinion it is 5.96%. In the defaulting group, the rate for firms that received a going-concern opinion is 35.49% and for firms that received a clean opinion it is 16.96%. Checks for robustness across different asset classes, age, industries, and regions indicate that firms that receive a going-concern opinion on average default more than those that receive a clean opinion.     

Loan loss accounting and procyclical bank lending: The role of direct regulatory actions

I provide evidence that loan loss accounting affects procyclical lending through its impact on regulatory actions. Regulators are more likely to place banks with inadequate loan loss allowances under enforcement actions that restrict lending, leading these banks to lend less during downturns. Further, I find that banks with lower regulatory ratings lend less when they have more timely provisions, consistent with research theorizing that timely provisions increase transparency and inhibit regulatory forbearance. This regulatory action mechanism expands on prior research that has focused on the effect of loan loss recognition on regulatory capital adequacy during economic downturns.     

The determinants of price discovery: Evidence from US-Canadian cross-listed shares

We examine the determinants of price discovery for Canadian firms cross-listed on the main US stock exchanges over the period 1996–2011. Sampling at a one-minute frequency, we compute Gonzalo and Granger Component Shares (CS) and employ a system GMM approach to control for persistence in price discovery and endogeneity between CS and its determinants. We find that price discovery is highly persistent and that there is strong evidence of simultaneity between CS and its determinants. We conclude that lower relative spreads and higher relative trading activity increase an exchange’s contribution to price discovery. We also document that it is small trades that drive price discovery, particularly since the introduction of decimalization.     

The impact of taxation on bank profits: Evidence from EU banks

Using bank-level data for the period 1990–2005, we investigate to what extent European banks are able to shift their tax-burden forward. We examine the effects of corporate income tax (CIT) and value added tax (VAT) on pre-tax profits and their components, and find that both are shifted forward. The pass-through mainly involves total operating income, but as far as CIT is concerned it also affects loss provisions, with negative implications on stability of the banking systems.     

The international transmission of bank capital requirements: Evidence from the UK

We use data on UK banks? minimum capital requirements to study the impact of changes to bank-specific capital requirements on cross-border bank loan supply from 1999Q1 to 2006Q4. By examining a sample in which each recipient country has multiple relationships with UK-resident banks, we are able to control for demand effects. We find a negative and statistically significant effect of changes to banks? capital requirements on cross-border lending: a 100 basis point increase in the requirement is associated with a reduction in the growth rate of cross-border credit of 5.5 percentage points. We also find that banks tend to favor their most important country relationships, so that the negative cross-border credit supply response in “core” countries is significantly less than in others. Banks tend to cut back cross-border credit to other banks (including foreign affiliates) more than to firms and households, consistent with shorter maturity, wholesale lending which is easier to roll off and may be associated with weaker borrowing relationships.     

The influence of accounting enforcement on earnings quality of banks: Implications of bank regulation and the global financial crisis

We study the effects of country-level accounting enforcement on earnings quality of banks and whether bank regulation substitutes or complements the effect of accounting enforcement on bank earnings quality. We also examine whether the influence of accounting enforcement on bank earnings quality changed after the global financial crisis. Using a sample of listed banks from 40 countries between 2001 and 2014, and abnormal loan loss provisions (ALLP) as our main proxy for earnings quality, we document a consistent and strong association between accounting enforcement and bank earnings quality. More specifically, an increase in accounting enforcement decreases the level of ALLP and decreases the propensity to manage earnings to avoid losses. Furthermore, we provide empirical evidence that bank regulation complements the effect of accounting enforcement on bank earnings quality. Finally, unlike in the pre-crisis period, we find a positive association between accounting enforcement and income-decreasing ALLP in the post-crisis period, which indicates that stronger accounting enforcement is associated with more conservative earnings and higher loan loss reserves. Overall, our results indicate that accounting enforcement reduces opportunistic earnings management.     

The impact of foreign bank entry in emerging markets: Evidence from India

This paper uses the entry of foreign banks into India during the 1990s—analyzing variation in both the timing of the new foreign banks’ entries and in their location—to estimate the effect of foreign bank entry on domestic credit access and firm performance. In contrast to the belief that foreign bank entry should improve credit access for all firms, the estimates indicate that foreign banks financed only a small set of very profitable firms upon entry, and that on average, firms were 8 percentage points less likely to have a loan after a foreign bank entry because of a systematic drop in domestic bank loans. Similar estimates are obtained using the location of pre-existing foreign firms as an instrument for foreign bank locations. Moreover, the observed decline in loans is greater among smaller firms, firms with fewer tangible assets, and firms affiliated with business groups. The drop in credit also appears to adversely affect the performance of smaller firms with greater dependence on external financing. Overall, this evidence is consistent with the exacerbation of information asymmetries upon foreign bank entry.