Does financial integration make banks more vulnerable? Regulation,foreign owned banks,and the lender-of-last resort

We describe a simple model in which banks’ prudential efforts and public regulation can reduce the probability of bankruptcy. Focusing on the European example, we contrast the national case with an integrated banking market and find that banks will exert, and public regulators will demand, greater prudential effort to monitor their bank’s activities. Thus, financial integration may increase voluntary prudential behavior by banks, avoid a regulatory “race to the bottom,” and improve the soundness of the financial system. Along similar lines, we show that the absence of a dedicated lender of last resort within the euro area can reduce the probability of financial crisis. Despite these findings, the overall level of regulatory activity may remain suboptimal from a European perspective. We also discuss incentives for European banks to organize their foreign holdings in branches or subsidiaries.

Forecasting the optimal structure of the Russian banking system

The systemic approach is used to substantiate the conclusion that in sustainable banking systems, the number of banks and the structure of the banking sector depend on the amount of the dominant bank’s assets. It is shown that if Sberbank’s share in the Russian banking system’s total asset is 0.26, the number of banks in it should decrease several times and stay within the range of 55–165.     

Identifying the Liquidity Effects of Monetary Policy Shocks for a Small Open Economy: Turkey

This paper proposes a new liquidity measure for a small open economy. The new measure includes the net liquidity provided to the system by a central bank after accounting for the central bank’s involvement in the foreign exchange market. Empirical evidence gathered from Turkey suggests that a positive innovation in liquidity increases output temporarily and that its effect on prices, exchange rate and money are permanently higher.     

The Russian foreign exchange market: Achievements on the path to liberalization

The paper analyzes Russia’s macroeconomic conditions and main trends in its foreign exchange market under financial liberalization. Structural changes in the Russian foreign exchange market are juxtaposed with major trends and proportions in the world’s forex market such as swap and futures operations and the increased role of the single European currency in the economy and finances. In the examination of the initial results of the dual currency basket policy of the Bank of Russia, the accent is on the foreign exchange market infrastructure, i.e., exchange business, clearing and settlements, as a necessary condition for Russia’s integration into the world’s financial system.     

Systemically important banks: an analysis for the European banking system

In this paper we perform an empirical analysis to identify systemically important banks by a few individual bank characteristics that are easy to observe in practice. This analysis builds on a new method to construct measures of systemic relevance of individual institutions that are consistent with a risk analysis at the level of the banking system, taking correlations in bank asset returns into account. We derive asset return correlations for a sample of European publicly traded banks from market data and construct two risk measures: incremental value at risk and conditional expected shortfall. Incremental value at risk quantifies the individual contributions of banks to the system’s Value-at-Risk. Conditional expected shortfall measures the increase in the expected system wide deposit insurance liability that would follow from the default of an institution. The analysis of hypothetical defaults of institutions is performed consistently with the observed distribution of asset returns by using the conditional distribution. Both measures are then analyzed in a panel regression where individual characteristics are used to explain incremental value at risk and conditional expected shortfall.     

Do Foreign Investors Care about Labor Market Regulations?

This study investigates whether labor market flexibility affects foreign direct investment (FDI) flows across 19 Western and Eastern European countries. The analysis uses firm level data on new investments undertaken in the period 1998–2001. The study employs a variety of proxies for labor market regulations reflecting the flexibility of individual and collective dismissals, the length of the notice period and the required severance payment along with controls for business climate characteristics. The results suggest that greater flexibility in the host country’s labor market in absolute terms or relative to that in the investor’s home country is associated with larger FDI inflows. JEL no. F21, F23, J0     

Export instability and economic structure: An east-west comparison

Conclusion The purpose of this paper was to extend Massell’s model of export instability to the case of the European market and centrally planned economies. Using a common measure of export instability we first saw that the MEs displayed significantly greater export instability than the CPEs. Applying our extension of the Massell model we then found that this difference could be satisfactorily explained by the “other” structural characteristics of the economies involved, and one need not therefore invoke the difference in economic systems. In particular, exports of food and raw materials were each found to be significantly associated with greater export instability, while there was also a strong suggestion that countries with higher GNPC tended to experience, net of the other variables in the system, a greater degree of instability. Finally, a comparison of these results with those obtained by Massell revealed striking contrasts, indicating that very different policy conclusions could be drawn from the results of the two studies.     

Inflation Expectations and Inflation Uncertainty in the Eurozone: Evidence from Survey Data

This paper uses the European Commission’s Consumer Survey to assess whether inflation expectations have converged and whether inflation uncertainty has diminished following the introduction of the euro in Europe. Consumers’ responses to the survey suggest that inflation expectations depend more on past national inflation rates than on the ECB’s anchor for price stability. Inflation expectations do not converge significantly faster than actual inflation rates. Regarding inflation uncertainty, the data indicate a relationship with country size following the introduction of the euro. This suggests that within EMU, inflation uncertainty may increase in countries that have a smaller influence on ECB policy. JEL no.  D84, E31, E58     

The optimal exchange rate regime for a small country

This paper examines the welfare comparisons between a freely floating, a managed floating, and a pegged exchange rate regime. We compare the expected loss under these regimes by modifying and generalizing Hamada’s (2002) model to accommodate intervention policy. We consider the de jure and de facto classifications, where the former is defined by the officially stated intentions of the monetary authorities, while the latter is based on the actually observed behavior of the nominal exchange rate. We first examine the exchange rate regimes from the central bank’s policy stance and the actual exchange rate policy. Next we assume that the regime which the private sector perceives according to an official announcement may be different from the one adopted actually by the central bank. We examine nine combinations of the de jure and de facto regimes. We interpret that, whenever they are different, there is informational friction between the central bank and the private sector. We show that the welfare level of a small country under freely floating is no less than that under other regimes, and that with some restrictive conditions, the de facto pegged or de facto managed floating is close to freely floating. This partly explains “Fear of floating” and “Fear of pegging”.     

Much ado about nothing: the limitation of liability and the market for 19th century Irish bank stock

Limited liability is widely believed to be a prerequisite for the emergence of an active and liquid securities market because the transactions costs associated with trading ownership of unlimited liability firms are viewed as prohibitive. In this article, we examine the trading of shares in an Irish bank, which limited its liability in 1883. Using this bank’s archives, we assemble a time series of trading data, which we test for structural breaks. Our results suggest that the move to limited liability had a negligible impact upon the trading of this bank’s shares.     

Gradual Retirement: Preferences and Limitations

In the traditional retirement scenario, individuals work full-time or part-time until a given age, and then stop working abruptly. From the individual’s point of view, it seems more attractive to have a smooth transition, with gradual retirement. In Sweden and other European countries, specific gradual retirement programs have been created in the past 20 years, first in combination with early retirement programs and later to increase labour market participation of older workers. This paper surveys the existing literature on gradual retirement in the US and Europe and analyzes the relevance of gradual retirement in the Netherlands as a tool to keep people employed longer.      

Factor Endowments and Production in European Regions

This paper analyses patterns of production across 14 industries in 45 regions from 7 European countries since 1975. We estimate an equation from neoclassical trade theory that relates an industry’s share of a region’s GDP to factor endowments, relative prices and technology. The strict version of the Heckscher–Ohlin model that assumes identical relative prices and technology is rejected against more general alternatives. However, factor endowments play a statistically significant and quantitatively important role in explaining production patterns. Factor endowments are more successful at explaining patterns of production in aggregate industries (Agriculture, Manufacturing and Services) than in disaggregated industries within manufacturing. JEL no. F11, F14, R13     

Central Bank Balance Sheets and the Transmission of Financial Crises

Central banks usually “park” their foreign exchange reserves in safe or highly liquid foreign assets. The paper illustrates that when central banks invest instead in risky foreign assets, then domestic banking crises can cause a crisis in the market for the foreign asset and vice versa. The paper takes its motivation from Asian central banks’ recent appetite for US government agency-debt securities such as those issued by Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac.     

Maastricht: New and Old Rules

Thanks to the Maastricht Treaty and similar arrangements, central banks nowadays enjoy considerable independence. This is generally believed to be the result of relatively recent debates, which led to the conclusion that sheltering monetary authorities from the pressures of fiscal policymakers is a prerequisite for monetary stability. However, in history this point has in fact been a recurrent tenet. We start with David Ricardo’s arguments in favour of central bank independence and against monetisation of public deficits. After WWI, the latter issue was at the heart of the 1920 International Financial Conference of the League of Nations, which fostered and guided the establishment of many new central banks, and shaped various policymaking arrangements of today’s monetary authorities. JEL Classification Numbers: B12, B22, E42, E58, E61     

Modeling coordinated foreign exchange market interventions: The case of the Japanese and U.S. interventions in the 1990s

During the past thirty years, central banks often intervened in foreign exchange markets. Sometimes they carried out foreign exchange market interventions on a unilateral basis. However, central banks often coordinated their foreign exchange market interventions. We develop a quantitative reaction function model that renders it possible to study the factors that made central banks switch from unilateral to coordinated interventions. We apply our model to the intervention policies of the Japanese monetary authorities and the U.S. Federal Reserve in the yen/U.S. dollar market during the period 1991–2001. To this end, we use recently released official data on the foreign exchange market interventions of the Japanese monetary authorities. JEL no. F31, F33, G14, G15     

The performance of black-owned commercial banks: A comparative analysis

The objective of this study was to examine performance differences among black banks of different asset sizes, as compared with average nonminority banks of similar asset size from 1985 to 1991. The study found that large black banks with assets over $50 million outperformed smaller black banks with assets less than $50 million in terms of return on assets (ROA) and return on owners’ equity. Also, when compared with average nonminority banks with assets less than $300 million, the large black banks exhibited a statistically significant higher ROA than average nonminority banks in 1985 through 1987. However, the differences were found to be statistically insignificant in terms of return on owners’ equity (ROE) during the study period. Regression results show that provision for loan loss, high liquidity, and investment in treasury and government securities continue to impact negatively on small black banks’ performance but these factors have no statistically significant impact on large black banks’ performance.     

Bank cooperation and banking policy in a monetary union: A political-economy perspective on EMU

Why do large European banks lobby for monetary union? We show in a game-theoretic model that montary union can trigger a change in the structure of the market for international banking transactions with asymmetric effects on profits: large banks are induced to cooperate internationally and gain from European Monetary Union (EMU), while small banks are likely to lose. Monetary union can be interpreted as a device for large banks to push small banks out of the market for cross-border financial services.     

我国中小银行发展制约与对策

随着金融市场的开放和金融体制改革的深入,中小银行的发展越来越引起人们的关注,市场垄断和公司治理缺陷是目前影响我国中小银行发展的主要因素,中小银行发展应首先找准市场定位,进行市场细分,同时寻求理想的战略投资者,形成多元化的股权结构和健全的公司治理机制,而政府则应逐步打破银行业的垄断结构,为中小银行的持续健康发展营造一个公平竞争的市场环境。     

Notes And Communications

This communication sketches in headlines long term developments in American and European banking. Contrary to the expectation of both practitioners and theorists in the nineties, has the role of banks in the economy not diminished but increased. This is demonstrated by the long term increase of bank credit as a percentage of GDP (resulting in a stronger growth of M2 and 3 than GDP), a growing contribution of bank sector income to GDP, growing employment (until recently) and a growing share of bank shares in total market capitalisation over the past three decades until 2004–2006. This growing share may have been induced by a comparatively superior performance, supported by a relatively high dividend yield, despite a lower-than-average price-earning ratio. Banks counteracted increased competition and disintermediation tendencies in their traditional lending business by a progressive involvement in capital markets. They developed themselves, in several functions, these markets. For this reason the often used distinction between bank-based and market-based financial systems is less meaningful. Capital markets function thanks to banks. Even more because a rapidly growing volume of new, unlisted investment instruments are constructed by banks and traded over their counter. By this development the risk absorbing and intermediating function of banks – being their basic function in the financial system – is also accentuated. The professional capability of leading banks to fulfil this basic function has in the current “sub prime” crisis come under severe criticism.     

Exchange rate determination: a theory of the decisive role of central bank cooperation and conflict

Economists’ faith that variable exchange rates benevolently equilibrate has been empirically disconfirmed. That faith is here tackled at its theoretical core with an exchange rate model that although ultra abstract, includes the undeniable fundamentals of market power and differential goals of central bankers and large-scale private players. It permits a game theoretic analysis under the assumption that all agents maximize their payoffs. The paper then relaxes the assumption of maximising agents, allowing for a more complex and thus realistic second version of the model that is interpretable within SKAT, the Stages of Knowledge Ahead Theory of risk and uncertainty. In an experimental setting, this second version of the model points to: a) the inability of agents in central banks, governments and the private real and financial sectors to operate in maximising ways; b) destructive central bank conflict; and c) the widely discrepant outcomes arising from the dynamics of individual personality differences. The paper’s theoretical and empirical findings thus both point to the merits of a single world currency.