Bank risk,competition and bank connectedness with firms: A literature review

The outbreak of the 2007–2009 financial crisis and of the European sovereign debt crisis again raised questions about the vulnerability and the behaviour of banking institutions. The unconventional monetary policies that followed have flattened the yield curve and created a low interest rates environment. This can give rise to risk-taking behaviour from banks and can therefore undermine the stability of the banking system with negative impact of the credit supply, corporate investment and real economy. This article proposes a literature review on the main determinants of bank lending and risk-taking decisions, going through the competition in the banking market, the bank connectedness with firms and the role of monetary and banking authorities. The systemic risk concept is also discussed as well as its drivers and potential measures that should be monitored by prudential authorities in order to preserve financial stability.     

Debt-overhang banking crises: Detecting and preventing systemic risk

This paper shows how the debt-overhang distortion on bank lending can generate a self-fulfilling-expectations banking crisis accompanied by a plunge in the value of banks’ assets and a contraction of bank lending and economic activity. Moral hazard in banking adds an additional channel that can generate multiple equilibria, worsen the debt-overhang distortion, and deepen the crisis. Some signals of systemic risk include: high volatility and the presence of two modes in the probability distribution functions of the returns on bank-issued bonds and on portfolios of bank-issued bonds and equities; and high correlation between the returns on bank-issued bonds. Macroprudential regulation should discourage the exposure of banks to the economic and financial cycle by raising the capital requirements for banks with more cyclical assets.     

金融深化是化解民间借贷危机的根本途径

以温州为代表的民间借贷危机的发生,折射出我国金融体制方面的制度性问题。金融压抑是民间借贷危机的根本原因,银行大企业集团等参与民间放贷对危机发生推波助澜,紧缩的货币政策是民间借贷危机爆发的导火索。金融深化是化解民间借贷危机的根本途径。民间借贷危机爆发,也倒逼金融体制要加快改革步伐,现在到了该放开金融领域进入和利率管制,打破现有银行垄断体制,建立由市场资金供求决定各种利率水平的市场利率体系的时候了。     

Cross-border banking,bank market structures and market power: Theory and cross-country evidence

Patterns in cross-border banking have changed since the global financial crisis. This may affect domestic bank market structures and macroeconomic stability in the longer term. In this study, I theoretically and empirically analyze how different modes of cross-border banking impact bank concentration and market power. I use a two-country general equilibrium model with heterogeneous banks developed by DeBlas and Russ (2010a) to grasp the effect of cross-border lending and foreign direct investment in the banking sector on bank market structures. The model suggests that both cross-border lending and bank FDI mitigate concentration. Empirical evidence from a panel dataset of 18 OECD countries supports the theoretical predictions: higher volumes of bank FDI and of cross-border lending coincide with lower Herfindahl-indexes in bank credit markets.     

Differential impact of Korean banking system reforms on bank productivity

We study the impact of banking system reforms during a crisis following a period of undisciplined lending. Regulatory changes aimed at strengthening the banks’ capital structure and risk management practices do not have a uniform impact on bank productivity, but rather favor financially sound or strategically privileged banks. We present evidence documenting the differential impact of regulatory reforms on Korean commercial bank productivity over the period 1995–2005. Average technical efficiency of banks decreased during the financial crisis of 1997–1998. It improved following the subsequent bank restructuring and continued to improve through 2005. The capital adequacy ratio is positively associated with banks’ technical efficiency. The non-performing loans ratio is negatively associated with technical efficiency. Both relationships are accentuated during the crisis but attenuated after the reforms.     

Bank-to-bank lending channel and the transmission of bank liquidity shocks: Evidence from France

Good liquidity is essential for the banking system to function properly and supply credit to the real sector. However, several banks all over the world face large shocks to their liquidity supply due to numerous factors. This study contributes to the literature on the transmission of liquidity shocks by investigating the bank-to-bank lending behavior of French banks during the global financial crisis (2008 and 2009). In addition, we examine the factors strongly influencing the liquidity of the interbank deposits market. First, using a fixed-effects model on a sample of 85 French banks for the period from 2005 to 2010, we find that the deposits channel plays an important role in the transmission of liquidity shocks across the banking system. Second, we use difference-in-difference methodology to study the effects of liquidity shock on bank lending. Our results show that French banks reduced their bank-to-bank lending significantly during the financial crisis period. Moreover, our results suggest that the reduction could have been due to deposit activities.     

Relationship and Transaction Lending: New Evidence and Perspectives

In this article, I try to answer three questions: (1) How do relationship lending and transaction lending vary over the cycle? (2) How do economic systems that are more “bank oriented” perform compared to “market-oriented” systems? (3) What are the consequences on relationship banking of the recent structural bank regulation reforms adopted to separate specific investment and commercial banking activities? Building on some recent evidence, the main conclusions are as follows: (1) Relationship banks protect their clients in normal downturns; (2) when recessions coincide with a financial crisis, countries that rely relatively more on bank financing tend to be more severely hit; (3) the effects of structural bank regulation initiatives on relationship banking are uncertain.     

The role of lender country factors in cross border bank lending

This article considers the cross-border lending stock from 19 advanced countries to European countries using quarterly data for 1999–2016. An extended model based on home and host country characteristics conditioned on distance and mass primarily measured by GDP is used to explain the behaviour of cross-border lending stocks. We focus particularly on the competitive structure of domestic banking markets and on the role of EU integration using indicators from the New Industrial Economics literature. Our results suggest EU integration has had a large effect on cross-border lending, although this has been partly reversed after Euro debt crisis. This reversal probably arises more from the actions of home country bank regulators rather than from the rise in risk premia in host countries. We show that in general lender rather than borrower factors are more important, and that more concentrated or less competitive lender countries do more cross border lending, especially in less concentrated or more competitive borrowers. Our results are robust across a range of specifications.     

State contingent banking and asset price bubbles: The case of Islamic banking industry

This paper examines how state contingent banking can help neutralize challenges like debt overhang and lack of optimal risk takings, problems associated with conventional banking that can eventually manifest in the creation of asset price bubbles and a financial crisis. Our analysis also contributes to the literature on Islamic banking which considers state contingent contracts as ideal from a religious perspective. We develop a model of banking with state contingent contracts on the liability and asset sides. Our model shows that in state contingent banking, the returns for the depositors, bank and the borrowers are more aligned with the real economy, which reduces the incentive for excessive borrowing, lending and investing. Our model also shows that with the state contingent banking on the liability side, during periods of heightened macroeconomic risk, depositors' payoff would be more volatile reducing the liquidity influx from the real economy to the banking sector. This neutralizes the pressure on state contingent banks to excessively lend on the asset side. Our model further demonstrates that state contingent contracts on the asset side can help avoid too much (or too little) lending by reducing the managerial discretion in charging low (or high) interest rates. With returns linked to the prices of the underlying assets, state contingent contracts may prevent lack of optimal risk taking.     

The spread of deposit insurance and the global rise in bank asset risk since the 1970s

We construct a new measure of deposit insurance generosity for many countries, empirically model the exogenous international influences on the adoption and generosity of deposit insurance and use a novel econometric method to explore the causal chain from the expansion of deposit insurance generosity to increased overall lending, increased lending to households, increased banking system leverage, and more severe and frequent banking crises. Greater deposit insurance generosity robustly produces greater overall lending relative to bank assets and more lending to households relative to both bank assets and GDP, and results in higher banking system leverage. Our estimates, however, are not conclusive regarding whether greater deposit insurance generosity resulted in greater total loans relative to GDP or in more frequent or severe banking crises.     

The Determinants of Bank Capital Ratios in a Developing Economy

This paper reports new findings on the determinants of bank capital ratios. The results are from an unbalanced panel data set spanning eight years around the period of the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis. Test results suggest a strong positive link between regulatory capital and bank management’s risk-taking behaviour. The risk-based capital standards of the regulators did not have an influence on how regulatory capital is adjusted by low-capitalized banks, perhaps due to the well-documented banking fragility during the test period. Finally, bank capital decisions seem not to be driven by bank profitability, which finding is inconsistent with developed country literature that has for long stressed the importance of banks’ earnings as driving capital ratios. Although the study focuses only on one developing economy, these findings may help to identify the correlates of bank capital ratios in both developed and developing economies since this topic has received scant attention of researchers. These findings are somewhat consistent with how banks engaging in risky lending across the world could have brought on the 2007–2008 banking liquidity and capital erosion crisis.     

The Impact of Foreign Banks on Monetary Policy Transmission During the Global Financial Crisis of 2008–2009: Evidence from Korea

This article examines the impact of foreign banks on the monetary policy transmission mechanism in the Korean economy during the period from 2000 to 2012, with a specific focus on the lending behavior of banks with different types of ownership. Using bank-level panel data of the banking system in Korea, we present consistent evidence on the buffering impact that the foreign banks, especially foreign bank branches including US bank branches, on the effectiveness of the monetary policy transmission mechanism in Korea from the bank-lending channel perspective during the global financial crisis of 2008–2009.     

Credit information,consolidation and credit market performance: Bank-level evidence from developing countries

Paying particular attention to the degree of banking market concentration in developing countries, this paper examines the effect of credit information sharing on bank lending. Using bank-level data from African countries over the period 2004 to 2009 and a dynamic two-step system generalised method of moments (GMM) estimation, it is found that credit information sharing increases bank lending. The degree of banking market concentration moderates the effect of credit information sharing on bank lending. The results are robust to controlling for possible interactions between credit information sharing and governance.     

Effect of Banking Regulation on Performance: Evidence from Turkey

In this study, we investigate the effect of regulation on banking sector performance in an emerging country context. Consecutive crises in the early 2000s led to three waves of reformist banking regulations in Turkey: (1) the banking sector restructuring program in 2002, (2) limitation of the full deposit insurance system in 2004, and (3) a corporate governance-related banking law in 2005. Results show that these actions had a positive effect on bank lending, asset quality, and profitability. Findings also support the view that the sequence and timing of banking reforms in Turkey acted as a shield against the global financial crisis of 2008.     

影子银行的发展及其监管

自上个世纪末以来,影子银行快速发展,资产规模已接近传统银行体系。影子银行的风险被认为是造成2008年全球金融危机的重要原因,各国和国际金融机构近年纷纷出台加强影子银行监管的措施,试图改变过去监管缺失的状态。和国外影子银行以资产证券化为核心不同,我国影子银行的主要功能是作为融资渠道。因此,我国要借鉴国外影子发展和监管的经验,正确看待影子银行的作用,引导其规范发展并将其作为银行体系的有益补充。     

Bank pay caps,bank risk,and macroprudential regulation

This paper studies the consequences of a regulatory pay cap in proportion to assets on bank risk, bank value, and bank asset allocations. The cap is shown to lower banks’ risk and raise banks’ values by acting against a competitive externality in the labour market. The risk reduction is achieved without the possibility of reduced lending from a Tier 1 increase. The cap encourages diversification and reduces the need a bank has to focus on a limited number of asset classes. The cap can be used for Macroprudential Regulation to encourage banks to move resources away from wholesale banking to the retail banking sector. Such an intervention would be targeted: in 2009 a 20% reduction in remuneration would have been equivalent to more than 150 basis points of extra Tier 1 for UBS, for example.     

Banking Relationships and Syndicated Loans during the 2008 Financial Crisis

The research shows that banking relationships are important to lending. However, few studies focus on the banking relationships in syndicated loans, although these loans have became a major source of financing. The last financial crisis clearly shows the impacts of credit rationing and tightening credit conditions, even in the syndicated loans market. We investigate whether banking relationships help firms to benefit from better terms for syndicated loans in a chaotic financial environment. Using a sample of syndicated loans arranged from 2003 to 2008 in North America and Europe, we find that firms with a previously developed relationship with a lead bank obtained a lower spread and a longer maturity during the financial crisis but did not benefit from larger loan facilities.     

Shadow Banking,Risk Transfer,and Financial Stability

Shadow banking is the process by which banks raise funds from and transfer risks to entities outside the traditional commercial banking system. Many observers blamed the sudden expansion in 2007 of U.S. sub‐prime mortgage market disruptions into a global financial crisis on a “liquidity run” that originated in the shadow banking system and spread to commercial banks. In response, national and international regulators have called for tighter and new regulations on shadow banking products and participants. Preferring the term “market‐based finance” to the term “shadow banking,” the authors explore the primary financial instruments and participants that comprise the shadow banking system. The authors review the 2007–2009 period and explain how runs on shadow banks resulted in a liquidity crisis that spilled over to commercial banks, but also emphasize that the economic purpose of shadow banking is to enable commercial banks to raise funds from and transfer risks to non‐bank institutions. In that sense, the shadow banking system is a shock absorber for risks that arise within the commercial banking system and are transferred to a more diverse pool of non‐bank capital instead of remaining concentrated among commercial banks. The article also reviews post‐crisis regulatory initiatives aimed at shadow banking and concludes that most such regulations could result in a less stable financial system to the extent that higher regulatory costs on shadow banks like insurance companies and asset managers could discourage them from participating in shadow banking. And the net effect of this regulation, by limiting the amount of market‐based capital available for non‐bank risk transfer, may well be to increase the concentrations of risk in the banking and overall financial system.     

The interest rate pass-through in the euro area during the sovereign debt crisis

We investigate the pass-through of monetary policy to bank lending rates in the euro area during the sovereign debt crisis, in comparison to the pre-crisis period. We make the following contributions. First, we use a factor-augmented vector autoregression, which allows us to assess the responses of a large number of country-specific interest rates and spreads. Second, we analyze the effects of monetary policy on the components of the interest rate pass-through, which reflect banks' funding risk (including sovereign risk) and markups charged by banks over funding costs. Third, we not only consider conventional but also unconventional monetary policy. We find that while the transmission of conventional monetary policy to bank lending rates has not changed with the crisis, the composition of the pass-through has changed. Specifically, expansionary conventional monetary policy lowered sovereign risk in peripheral countries and longer-term bank funding risk in peripheral and core countries during the crisis, but has been unable to lower banks' markups. This was not, or not as much, the case prior to the crisis. Unconventional monetary policy helped decreasing lending rates, mainly due to large shocks rather than a strong propagation.     

Theories of bank behavior under capital regulation

This paper reviews academic studies of bank capital regulation in an effort to evaluate the intellectual foundation for the imposition of the Basel I and Basel II systems of risk-based capital requirements. The theoretical literature yields general agreement about the immediate effects of capital requirements on bank lending and loan rates and the longer-term impacts on bank ratios of equity to total or risk-adjusted assets. This literature produces highly mixed predictions, however, regarding the effects of capital regulation on asset risk and overall safety and soundness for the banking system as a whole. Thus, the intellectual foundation for the present capital-regulation regime is not particularly strong. The mixed conclusions in the academic literature on banking certainly do not provide unqualified support for moving to an even more stringent and costly system of capital requirements. These widely ambiguous results do suggest, however, that assessing the implications of capital regulation for balance-sheet risk and monitoring effort in diverse banking systems is an important agenda for future theoretical research in the banking area.