Capital regulation, bank competition, and financial stability

We analyze capital requirements if banks compete for loans and deposits. Banks and firms are subject to a risk-shifting problem. The ambiguous effect of competition on banks’ risk-taking translates into an ambiguous effect of capital requirements on financial stability.     

Deregulation, market power and risk behaviour in Spanish banks

This paper provides empirical evidence on the effects of regulatory changes in the market power of Spanish banks. It also analyses the response of banks, in terms of risk-taking behaviour, as a result of a reduction in economic profits. We find that liberalisation measures have increased competition and eroded banks’ market power. We observe that banks with lower charter values tend to have lower equity-assets ratios (lower solvency) and to experience higher credit risk. The last evidence is new in the literature and calls for strengthening regulatory concerns about credit risk management by banks in situations of increased competition.     

Screening, cross-border banking, and the allocation of credit

The author analyses competition among banks when banks can use creditworthiness tests that generate (imperfect) information about borrowers. When banks can strategically adjust the test characteristics by investing resources in the screening technology, he shows that credit markets are not easily contestable. An increase in the intensity of competition may have few effects on incumbents» conduct and overall market shares. Moreover, conditions are provided under which screening efforts are reduced by competition. In such situations the quality of the overall loan portfolio declines and the economy incurs higher aggregate risk due to the lower quality of banks» information production. The welfare gains from integrating fragmented loan markets can actually be negative.     

Last bank standing: What do I gain if you fail?

Banks attitude towards speculative lending is typically regarded as the result of trading-off the short-term gains from risk-taking against the risk of loss of charter value. We study the trade-off between stability and competition in a dynamic setting where charter value depends on future market competition. Promoting the takeover of failed banks by solvent institutions results in greater market concentration and larger rents for the surviving incumbents. This converts banks’ speculative lending decisions into strategic substitutes, granting an additional incentive to remain solvent. Entry policy may subsequently serve to fine-tune the trade-off between competition and stability.     

寡头垄断、风险竞争与中小银行的发展困境:2001-2006

金融市场开放和改革使我国中小银行得到了较快发展,但也逐步陷入了风险扩张而绩效下滑的困境中.运用基于Stackelberg模型构建的寡头垄断市场银行风险竞争模型来对中小银行发展困境进行的实证研究发现,在资金价格(存贷款利率)受到严格管制的垄断市场中,银行间的竞争将会导致银行体系风险水平与资产规模的不断扩张,而不是经营绩效的持续提升.要使中小银行摆脱发展困境并得到健康发展,必须在培育银行业专业化分工的同时逐渐打破银行体系的垄断格局,推进利率市场化,放开对资金价格的严格限制,使中小银行的非价格竞争劣势转变为价格竞争优势;同时加强对中小银行的监管,为其营造一个公平竞争的市场环境.     

Fundamentals, information, and international capital flows: A welfare analysis

In the recent discussion surrounding the design of a new international financial architecture, enhancing transparency has widely been proposed as a policy essential for increasing the efficiency of international capital markets. This paper uses a simple two-country (two-agent) general equilibrium model with incomplete markets and production to explore the welfare consequences of an increase in public information about country-specific fundamentals (increase in transparency). An improvement in the quality of information has two effects on the ex ante welfare of individual countries: A direct effect that increases the efficiency of global capital allocation and welfare, and an indirect general equilibrium effect that increases asset price volatility and may decrease welfare. When the degree of risk-aversion is low, at least one country will gain from an increase in information quality. If the degree of risk-aversion is high, then there are robust examples of economies for which an increase in information hurts all countries. The paper also discusses how certain institutional arrangements (international derivative markets, international agency) could ensure that all countries gain from better information by providing insurance against information-induced asset price risk.     

信息披露、存款保险制度与银行系统性风险

文章基于不完全信息动态博弈模型,对信息披露、存款保险制度与系统性风险之间的作用机制进行了理论分析,并使用2006-2014年24个国家137家上市商业银行的面板数据进行了实证考察。研究发现,提高银行的信息披露程度,有助于降低融资成本和存款保险缴费费率,引导其减小银行间资产的相关性,从而降低系统性风险;存款保险的金融稳定效应不明显,提高信息披露程度有效缓解了存款保险制度的道德风险,两者在降低银行系统性风险方面存在协同效应。设计合理的存款保险制度、经验丰富的监管当局和严格的监管体系有助于发挥市场约束作用,限制存款保险的道德风险,从而维护金融体系的稳定。因此,在我国正式实施存款保险制度的背景下,监管部门应加强银行信息披露和优化存款保险设计,以更好地防范我国金融体系的系统性风险。     

Allocating bank regulatory powers: Lender of last resort, deposit insurance and supervision

We examine the optimal institutional allocation of bank regulation. We find that centralizing the lending of last resort and deposit insurance functions in a regulator leads to excessive forbearance. It also leads the bank to invest suboptimally in loans. Giving this regulator supervision improves on both problems, but it still does not lead to the efficient outcome. In the multi-regulator arrangement, we find that it is beneficial to give supervision to the deposit insurer. The choice between the unified-regulator arrangement and the multi-regulator arrangement involves a trade-off: The multi-regulator arrangement reduces the forbearance problem at high levels of liquidity shortage but may exacerbate it at low levels. These results assume the absence of information frictions. When banks are better informed than regulators, we show that regulators may have an incentive not to share private information, suggesting it is important to consider regulators’ informational advantages when deciding on the allocation of regulation.     

显性部分存款保险下的有效银行退出机制--基于成本收益分析下的博弈分析

目前,中国银行业还没有建立起有效的市场退出机制和相关的制度安排,这不符合市场经济条件下金融业的基本规则,也给国家带来了沉重的负担.本论文通过一个二阶段完全信息动态博弈模型的分析揭示,由于银监会未建立起有效的成本约束下的市场退出机制,使得相机抉择的关闭机制对于商业银行而言是一个不可置信的威胁,促进了商业银行的冒险投资,加之隐性存款保险的存在,形成巨大的社会成本和福利损失.目前条件下,加快市场退出机制建设并建立与之相配套的显性部分存款保险制度是一个上佳的选择.     

Market Structure and Risk Taking in the Banking Industry

We demonstrate that the common view according to which an increase in competition leads banks to increased risk taking fails to hold in an environment where homogeneous loss averse consumers can choose in which bank to make a deposit based on their knowledge of the riskiness incorporated in the banks outstanding loan portfolios. With an exclusive focus on imperfect competition we find that banks incentives for risk taking are invariant to a change in the banking market structure from duopoly to monopoly. Finally, we show that deposit insurance would eliminate the gains from bank competition when banks use asset quality as a strategic instrument.revised version received October 15, 2003     

On the welfare equivalence of asset markets and banking in Diamond Dybvig economies

Why do people choose bank deposit contracts over a direct participation in asset markets? In their seminal paper, Diamond and Dybvig’s (1983) answer this question by claiming that bank deposit contracts can implement allocations that are welfare superior to asset markets equilibria. The present paper demonstrates that this claim is false whenever the asset market participants are highly rational.     

A model of takeovers of foreign banks

This paper investigates the determinants of the takeover of a foreign bank by a domestic bank whereby the former becomes a branch of the latter. Each bank is initially supervised by a national agency that cares about closure costs and deposit insurance payouts, and may decide the early closure of the bank on the basis of supervisory information. Under the principle of home country control, the takeover moves responsibility for both the supervision of the foreign bank and the insurance of the foreign deposits to the domestic agency. It is shown that the takeover is more likely to happen if the foreign bank is small (relative to the foreign banking market) and its investments are risky (relative to those of the domestic bank). Moreover, the takeover is in general welfare improving for both countries.     

MIXED OWNERSHIP,MANAGERIAL INCENTIVES AND BANK COMPETITION

We consider deposit competition between two banks, where prior to competition one bank is subjected to a nationalization decision and the other bank chooses managerial incentives. The government who maximizes a modified form of social welfare (with greater weight on profit than depositor surplus) chooses only partial nationalization, which still hurts the rival private bank. But by offering deposit‐linked managerial incentives the private bank recovers its lost profit and induces even less nationalization, leaving social welfare unchanged. However, under interest rate competition for differentiated deposits the private bank offers profit‐linked managerial incentives while the other bank may be completely nationalized.     

Optimal Regulation of a Fully Insured Deposit Banking System

We analyze risk sensitive incentive compatible deposit insurance in the presence of private information when the market value of deposit insurance can be determined using Merton's (1977, 3-11) formula. We show that, under the assumption that transferring funds from taxpayers to financial institutions has a social cost, the optimal regulation combines different levels of capital requirements combined with decreasing premia on deposit insurance. On the other hand, it is never efficient to require the banks to hold riskless assets. Finally, chartering banks is necessary in order to decrease the cost of asymmetric information.     

存款保险制度的产生发展及其理论基础

本文通过对存款保险制度在国际上产生发展的背景分析 ,发现该制度在实践中有内在的必然性 ,在理论上有坚实的基础 ,银行的存在是金融效率所在 ,尽管挤兑可能会发生甚至迅速演化为银行危机 ,但不能否定银行的客观必要性。相反 ,需要防止挤兑和银行危机发生的制度安排 ,其中没有任何一种安排能够取代存款保险制度。中国现在比以往任何时候都需要采纳这一制度以适应市场化金融改革开放的需要 ,当然相应的技术问题仍需要解决。     

Natural vs. financial insurance in the management of public-good ecosystems

In the face of uncertainty, ecosystems can provide natural insurance to risk averse users of ecosystem services. We employ a conceptual ecological-economic model in which ecosystem management has a private insurance value and, through ecosystem processes at higher hierarchical levels, generates a positive externality on other ecosystem users. We analyze the allocation of (endogenous) risk and ecosystem quality by risk averse ecosystem managers who have access to financial insurance, and study the implications for individually and socially optimal ecosystem management, and policy design. We show that while an improved access to financial insurance leads to lower ecosystem quality, the effect on the extent of the public-good problem and on welfare is determined by ecosystem properties. We derive conditions on ecosystem functioning under which, if financial insurance becomes more accessible, (i) the extent of optimal regulation increases or decreases; and (ii) welfare, in the absence of environmental regulation, increases or decreases.     

The Effects of Competition on Banks’ Risk Taking

We consider the joint effect of competition and deposit insurance on risk taking by banks when bank risk is unobservable to depositors. It turns out that the magnitude of risk taking depends on the structure and side of the market in which competition takes place. If the bank is a monopoly or banks are competing only in the loan market, deposit insurance has no effect on risk taking. Banks in this situation tend to take risk, although extreme risk taking is avoided. In contrast, introducing deposit insurance increases risk taking if banks are competing for deposits. Then, deposit rates become excessively high, thereby forcing banks to take extreme risks.     

Globalization, the output-inflation tradeoff and inflation

This paper provides comprehensive evidence on the relation between inflation and globalization, defined here as trade and financial openness, using a large cross-section of 91 countries over the period 1985-2004. We establish two main empirical regularities: both higher trade and financial openness (i) reduce central banks’ inflation bias, yielding lower average inflation and (ii) are associated with a larger output-inflation tradeoff. This evidence is at odds with the standard Barro-Gordon framework, which would require globalization to have a negative effect on the output-inflation tradeoff to yield lower equilibrium inflation, but it is consistent with a recent strand of new Keynesian models emphasizing the role of imperfect competition and nominal rigidities. Our findings also support the relevance of the time-inconsistency hypothesis, which underlies the theoretical models predicting a relation between globalization and inflation. For the OECD subsample, however, we do not find an effect of openness on inflation (the output-inflation tradeoff), suggesting that these countries have created an institutional framework for central banks that eliminates distortions due to the time-inconsistency problem.     

Economic growth, liquidity, and bank runs

We construct an endogenous growth model in which bank runs occur with positive probability in equilibrium. In this setting, a bank run has a permanent effect on the levels of the capital stock and of output. In addition, the possibility of a run changes the portfolio choices of depositors and of banks, and thereby affects the long-run growth rate. These facts imply that both the occurrence of a run and the mere possibility of runs in a given period have a large impact on all future periods. A bank run in our model is triggered by sunspots, and we consider two different equilibrium selection rules. In the first, a run occurs with a fixed, exogenous probability, while in the second the probability of a run is influenced by banks’ portfolio choices. We show that when the choices of an individual bank affect the probability of a run on that bank, the economy both grows faster and experiences fewer runs.