An Examination of the Equity Market Response to The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act Across Commercial Banking, Investment Banking, and Insurance Firms

Abstract:  This paper examines the wealth effects of the events surrounding the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 and changes in systematic risk from the pre-Act period to the post-Act period for commercial banks, investment banks, and insurance firms. The results suggest that investment banks and insurance firms are better positioned to exploit the benefits of product-line diversification opportunities allowed by the legislation compared to commercial banks that experience no significant market reaction. Further evidence indicates a significant risk shift and overall reduction in riskiness for the financial sectors under consideration around the event period.     

The Wealth and Risk Effects of the Gramm‐Leach‐Bliley Act (GLBA) on the US Banking Industry

Abstract:   The Gramm‐Leach‐Bliley Act (GLBA) of 1999 marks the end of Depression era regulations like the Glass‐Steagall Act of 1933 and Bank Holding Company Act of 1956. These acts have restricted banks from securities and insurance underwriting business. This paper examines the impact of the GLBA on the banking industry. We find that the banking industry has a welfare gain from this law. We investigate two different categorizations of the banking industry. We find that Money Center banks followed by the Super Regional banks benefited most from this deregulation. On the other hand, banks that had Section 20 investment subsidiaries gained more than other banks in the second category. The results also show that the exposure to systematic risk for different categories of banks decreased after the passage of this law, which implies that the GLBA is fairly successful in containing the risk that accompanied the act and also created diversification opportunities. For Money Center banks, Super Regional Banks, banks with a section 20 subsidiary and banks with a new financial subsidiary, a shift in the exposure to systematic risk can explain the overall cross sectional variation in return from the deregulation. In both categorizations we find that larger banks gained more, while the overall explanatory power of profitability is not conclusive.     

Winners and Losers as Financial Service Providers Converge: Evidence from the Financial Modernization Act of 1999

The Financial Modernization Act of 1999 dramatically increased insurers' and investment banks' authority to provide an array of financial services and allowed commercial banks to offer investment banking and insurance services. In this paper we examine the market response to this legislation. We find a strong positive response among insurance companies and investment banks, and no significant response among commercial banks. Larger institutions in all three financial sectors earn higher abnormal returns. Additionally, better performing banks earn higher abnormal returns. Our results suggest that allowing financial convergence can add value through synergies and that large players are needed to exploit the scope economies.     

Information asymmetry and bank regulation: Can the spread of debt contracts be explained by recovery rates?

We investigate whether the spread of corporate debt contacts can be explained by their ultimate recovery rates. Using the actual realized recovery rates of defaulted debt instruments issued in the US from 1962 to 2007, we find that recovery rate is reflected in the spread at issuance, and that this relationship has become more significant since commercial banks were allowed to underwrite corporate securities. Our further investigation indicates that the enhanced informativeness of recovery rate can be attributed to the lowering of information asymmetry of individual firms. Besides, the relation between the spread at issuance and the recovery rate is stronger for weak corporate governance and non-investment grade issuers. Our conclusions are found to be robust to endogeneity issues, potentially omitted variables and alternative model specifications.     

Who Benefits from Deregulating the Separation of Banking Activities? Differential Effects on Commercial Bank,Investment Bank,and Thrift Stock Returns

We analyze the deregulation impact on commercial banks, investment banks, and thrifts associated with four major events progressively integrating commercial and investment banking activities in the United States during the 1990s. We find that commercial banks are the only group to react favorably to Federal Reserve announcements relaxing firewalls and easing restrictions on commercial bank revenues from investment banking activities. These regulations primarily benefit large banks. The Bankers Trust acquisition announcement of investment bank Alex Brown is associated with increased wealth for each of the three types of financial service institutions. At the eventual deregulation of the financial services industry, with the passage of the Financial Services Modernization Act in 1999, the values of commercial banks and investment banks increase significantly although thrifts are not affected.     

Financial Modernization in US Banking Markets: A Local or Global Event?

Abstract:   We test the hypothesis that the passage of the Financial Services Modernization Act (FSMA) of 1999 has spillover effects cross‐nationally, using a sample of US, non‐US transactional (Australian, Canadian, and UK), and relationship (German, Japanese, Dutch, and Swiss) banks. Our results suggest that financial modernization in the US has limited cross‐national effects. We find strong evidence that US banks were affected favorably. Although we detect some evidence of significant reactions by banks in certain countries, a closer examination reveals that the reaction is most likely attributable to events in the respective countries during the event period. We do find, however, that non‐US transactional banks have been more likely to elect financial holding company status compared to relationship banks, suggesting they are positioning themselves to exploit the expanded opportunity set created by the FSMA. Nonetheless, the majority of elections have been made by US banks. In general, the results suggest that the respective banking markets are efficient in filtering events that are largely country‐specific with only limited implications for other international banks.     

The Timing and Persistence of CRA Compliance Ratings

We evaluate supervisory practices in enforcing the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) by examining whether or not supervisors consider observable, bank-specific characteristics in (1) scheduling CRA compliance examinations and (2) determining whether, and for how long, a given CRA rating persists. Failure to confirm such a relationship would be consistent with criticism that the evaluation criteria are so vague that supervisors can essentially assign any rating they want for compliance purposes. Analysis of a sample of several thousand commercial banks, observed over a relatively stable regulatory regime, indicates that both examination scheduling and the persistence of examination ratings are associated with residential loan levels, a presumed cornerstone of the CRA, as well as other financial, regulatory and market factors. We conclude that CRA enforcement during this period reflected, at least in part, objective evaluation criteria.     

人民银行与我国的金融稳定--对《中国人民银行法》第二条的思考

金融稳定是一个具有全局性、综合性的概念。维护金融稳定，需要行政手段、经济手段和法律手段的综合运用。因此金融稳定需要政府、政府宏观经济管理部门、中央银行、财政部门及各金融监管部门采取不同的政策措施来影响金融机构、金融市场和经济运行才能实现。所以，虽然《人民银行法》将金融稳定的职责赋予人民银行，但是人民银行的法定职权并不足以使其承担起维护金融稳定的责任。     

美国金融监管的历史性变革——评析《多德-弗兰克法案》

为提升美国金融体系的稳定性和保护金融消费者利益,<多德-弗兰克华尔街改革和消费者保护法案>于2010年7月21日正式生效,该法案被认为是<格拉斯-斯蒂格尔法>以来最为重要的银行监管法案.该法案的内容主要包括加强对消费者权益的保护,预防系统性风险,改变金融机构"大而不能倒"的局面,加强对金融衍生品、信用评级机构、对冲基金...     

论区域金融调控

由于区域间经济发展差距的客观存在，必然会产生区域间的金融差距，通过实施适度区域差别的金融政策是各国为控制区域经济发展差距过大而普遍采用的政策措施。为此，建立区域经济发展基金，加快不发达区域经济发展，实行金融政策区域化，赋予区域中央银行一定的地方金融政策制定权和调控权，为区域经济发展提供金融保障是区域金融调控较好的选择。     

商业银行财富客户金融消费行为的统计与分析

本文分析了客户金融消费行为的影响因素和行为特征、商业银行提升高端客户拓展能力的要点.在对某分行进行调查的基础上,通过统计数据分析,发现财富客户具有以下行为特征:风险偏好多数为平衡型;稳定的客户持有基金、理财、保险、债券的比例较高;通过柜台和网银进行转账交易的比例较高;有客户经理维护时的客户稳定性高于无维护时,这些客户买...     

Household Wealth and Macroeconomic Activity: 2008–2013

This paper provides estimates of the effects of the fall in financial and housing wealth in 2008–09 on overall macroeconomic activity. When the wealth losses are run through a structural macroeconometric model, it is estimated that the fall in wealth contributed about 2.1 percentage points to the rise in the unemployment rate in 2009 and about 3.3 points in 2010. The contribution to the fall in real GDP was 4.5% and 5.4% in the 2 years. These estimates account for most—but not all—of the recessionary increase in unemployment. The remaining increase in unemployment may have resulted more directly from financial stresses, but little evidence is found for this in this study.     

Is Government Regulation of Banks Necessary?

Banks have been involved with and regulated by governments for hundreds of years. Following a brief review of this history, I delineate nine reasons that could justify continued regulation, particularly in the United States. These include deposit insurance, preventing banks from obtaining excessive economic power, reducing the cost of individual bank insolvency, avoiding the effects of bank failures on the economy, protecting the payments system, serving the interests of popularly elected officials, enhancing the Federal Reserve's control over the money supply, suppressing competition, and protecting consumers. Analysis of each leads me to conclude that deposit insurance, which allows banks to hold insufficient capital, is the only public-policy-justifiable rationale for regulation. This concern can be managed with capital requirements; otherwise, banks should only be regulated as are other corporations.     

What's Special About Banks?

I delineate six aspects of how banks have been “special” (although not unique) and then consider whether and to what extent these attributes are still relevant. These include efficiently produced products, importance for the development and growth of economies, international scope, role in economic instability and the conduct of monetary policy, early regulation by governments, and source of data for academic researchers and institutions. Despite changes in the environment and in the ways in which financial services are provided, banks still are special. However, their specialness for public policy concerns is now limited to frauds and deposit insurance. I suggest ways in which these concerns can be dealt with efficiently.     

Discriminating between wealth and information effects in event studies in accounting and finance research

This article examines the power of tests of given size to detect and distinguish between wealth (i.e., mean) and information (i.e., variance) effects in event studies. We find that an Estimated Generalized Least Squares (EGLS) mean-effects test is consistently more powerful than the test based upon the average standardized residual and is as powerful as a nonparametric rank test. Unlike the test based upon the average standardized residual and the rank test, the EGLS test is well specified even when the event affects the variances of the prediction errors. We also find that conventional parametric tests to detect changes in the variance of the event-day average abnormal return are misspecified when the null of no change is true. We analyze the reasons this occurs and suggest a rank procedure that produces tests of the correct size under the null. Our evidence suggests that the critical factors allowing researchers to distinguish between wealth and information effects are an estimation procedure incorporating the heteroskedasticity inherent in market model prediction errors and an explicit test for event-day variance changes.     

中国富裕阶层金融行为研究——基于商业银行拓展财富管理业务的视角

富裕阶层的快速成长是中国经济发展过程中的一个突出特点,对中国富裕阶层金融行为特征进行的理论解读及随机调查显示:中国富裕阶层更关注财富传承、生活品质与财富成长,理财知识匮乏、但投资自信心很强,投资倾向保守、但风险承受能力很强,倾向于选择商业银行作为理财机构,家庭互动是其理财决策的主要模式;对富裕阶层金融行为起主要影响作用...     

Spin-offs in an Environment of Bank Debt

Abstract:  An assessment of the wealth impact of spin-offs involving UK firms is of interest, as they tend to access debt through banks rather than capital markets. Banks will have a different relationship with shareholders, so the distribution of returns may differ from that previously observed. The short and long-term impact on both parent and spin-off shareholders is investigated. Possible reasons for a positive returns response, including an anticipated acquisition premium, and management focus related gains, are considered. Annual financial ratios offer a further evaluation of operating performance and assess the impact on levels of leverage in parents and spin-offs.     

中央银行为何不能挤破泡沫

资产价格泡沫一般源自“非理性繁荣”、技术进步和金融自由化等因素,货币条件与泡沫上涨之间的联系十分微弱,因此。中央银行不必也不可能通过紧缩货币来挤破泡沫。急剧收紧银根对经济的负面影响可能大于泡沫破裂,还可能增加银行体系的脆弱性并弱化金融监管。泡沫破裂的成本主要取决于金融结构,因而应从加强金融监管的角度减弱泡沫破裂的冲击。