Anatomy of banking crises in developing and emerging market countries

This paper uses a Binary Classification Tree (BCT) model to analyze banking crises in 50 emerging market and developing countries during 1990-2005. The BCT model identifies three conditions (and the specific threshold of the key indictors) at which the vulnerability to banking crisis increases—(i) very high inflation, (ii) highly dollarized bank deposits combined with nominal depreciation or low bank liquidity, and (iii) low bank profitability—which highlight that foreign currency risk, poor financial soundness, and macroeconomic instability are important drivers of banking crises. The results also emphasize the importance of conditional thresholds in triggering crises, in that banking crises are underlined by a combination of vulnerabilities—or a sequence of (non-linear) conditions—rather than the deterioration of a unique factor.     

Private Money and Banking Regulation

We show that a competitive banking system is inconsistent with an optimum quantity of private money. Because bankers cannot commit to their promises and the composition of their assets is not publicly observable, a positive franchise value is required to induce the full convertibility of bank liabilities. Under perfect competition, a positive franchise value can be obtained only if the return on bank liabilities is sufficiently low, which imposes a cost on those who hold these liabilities for transaction purposes. If the banking system is monopolistic, then an efficient allocation is incentive feasible. In this case, the members of the banking system obtain a higher return on assets, making it feasible to pay a sufficiently high return on bank liabilities. Finally, we argue that the regulation of the banking system is required to obtain efficiency.     

Macroeconomic effects of corporate default crisis: A long-term perspective

Using an extensive data set on corporate bond defaults in the US from 1866 to 2010, we study the macroeconomic effects of bond market crises and contrast them with those resulting from banking crises. During the past 150 years, the US has experienced many severe corporate default crises in which 20–50% of all corporate bonds defaulted. Although the total par amount of corporate bonds has at times rivaled the amount of bank loans outstanding, we find that corporate default crises have far fewer real effects than do banking crises. These results provide empirical support for current theories that emphasize the unique role that banks and the credit and collateral channels play in amplifying macroeconomic shocks.     

Banking crises and market discipline: International evidence

This paper analyzes the effect of banking crises on market discipline in an international sample of banks. We also evaluate how bank regulation, supervision, institutions, and crisis intervention policies shape the effect of banking crises on market discipline. We control for unobservable bank, country, and time specific effects using a panel data set of banks from 66 countries around 79 banking crises. The results suggest that on average market discipline weakens after a banking crisis. This weakening is higher in countries where bank regulation, supervision, and institutions promoted market discipline before the banking crisis, and where a more accommodative approach is adopted to resolve it.     

Financial crisis,structure and reform

In this study, we examine the relationship between the structure of financial systems and financial crises. Using cross-country data on financial structures and crises, we find that there is a significant short-term reversal in development of the banking sector and the stock market during both bank crises and market crashes, with the corporate bond market moving in the same direction as bank credit. However, the results are significant for countries with market-based financial systems but not for countries with bank-based financial systems. Emerging markets have mainly bank-based financial systems, which may explain why these markets require more time to recover from economic downturns after a financial crisis. Therefore, we argue that governments should emphasize a balanced financial system structure as it helps countries to recover from financial crises more quickly compared with countries that lack such balanced structures.     

Bank liabilities channel

The financial intermediation sector is important not only for channeling resources from agents in excess of funds to agents in need of funds (lending channel). By issuing liabilities it also creates financial assets held by other sectors of the economy for insurance or liquidity purpose. When the intermediation sector creates less liabilities or their value falls, agents are less willing to engage in activities that are individually risky but desirable in aggregate (bank liabilities channel). The paper shows how financial crises driven by self-fulfilling expectations about the liquidity of the banking sector are transmitted to the real sector of the economy. Since the government could also create financial assets by borrowing, the paper analyzes how public debt affects the issuance of liabilities by the financial intermediation sector.     

Bank panics and the endogeneity of central banking

Central banking is intimately related to liquidity provision to banks during times of crisis, the lender-of-last-resort function. This activity arose endogenously in certain banking systems. Depositors lack full information about the value of bank assets, so that during macroeconomic downturns they monitor their banks by withdrawing in a banking panic. The likelihood of panics depends on the industrial organization of the banking system. Banking systems with well-diversified big banks are less prone to inefficient bank runs because diversification alleviates the information asymmetry. In addition, big banks can self-monitor through publicly observable branch closure. Systems of many small banks form incentive-compatible bank coalitions to emulate the big banks during times of crisis. Such coalitions improve efficiency by monitoring member banks and issuing money that is a kind of deposit insurance—a precursor of central banking.     

Does the debt market assess large banks, risk? : Time series evidence from money center CDs

Uninsured bank liabilities should offer a promised yield that compensates depositors for their expected default losses. However, the conjectural, guarantees available to large U.S. banking firms makes it questionable whether large depositors should or do feel themselves exposed to credit risk. Prior papers have evaluated the determinants of bank risk premia using cross-sectional data, with relatively inconclusive results. This paper investigates the same issue in a methodologically independent fashion: using time series data on specific banks' daily offering rates during the period May 1982 through July 1988. We find that CD rates paid by large money center banks include significant default risk premia.     

Japan’s banking crisis: An event-study perspective

We calculate abnormal stock returns for Japanese non-financial companies around major events associated with the banking crisis (1995–2000), and find that not all companies were equally sensitive to the malaise of the banking sector: the most affected were small, leveraged, low-tech companies with low credit ratings and low market to book ratios. This is consistent with “credit crunch” theories (companies with limited access to financial markets are sensitive to changes in bank lending) and with claims that innovation is rarely financed by bank debt. We do not find much evidence on the alleged misallocation of loans to support ailing bank clients.     

Banking industry volatility and economic growth

Utilizing the recent dynamic panel GMM estimation techniques for 36 markets, this research investigates the relationship between banking industry volatility and future economic growth, and provides empirical evidence complementary to Cole et al. (2008) who examine the finance-growth nexus from a unique asset pricing theory perspective and document a positive relationship between bank stock returns and future economic growth that is significantly influenced by a series of country-specific and banking institutional characteristics. We find that the negative link between banking industry volatility and future economic growth is significantly affected by government ownership of banks, the enforcement of the insider trading law, systemic banking crises, and bank accounting disclosure standards, while the impact of financial development is ambiguous. The significant results are primarily driven by the data from emerging markets.     

Banking regulation and the output cost of banking crises

Using a cross-section time-series of 47 banking crisis episodes in 35 industrial and emerging market economies between the 1970s and 2003, this study analyses the relationship between banking regulation and supervision, and the severity of banking crises measured in terms of the magnitude of output loss. The empirical results show that countries that provide comprehensive deposit insurance coverage and enforce strict bank capital adequacy requirements experience a smaller output cost of crises. Restrictions on bank activities also influence the severity of crises. The results, however, do not suggest that there is a significant impact of bank supervision. In addition, there is no robust evidence that the magnitude of the output cost of crises depends on the extent of banks’ financial intermediation.     

Banking risk and regulation: Does one size fit all?

Using data for more than 200 banks from 21 OECD countries for the period 2002–2008, we examine the impact of bank regulation and supervision on banking risk using quantile regressions. In contrast to most previous research, we find that banking regulation and supervision has an effect on the risks of high-risk banks. However, most measures for bank regulation and supervision do not have a significant effect on low-risk banks. As banking risk and bank regulation and supervision are multi-faceted concepts, our measures for both concepts are constructed using factor analysis.     

The size of banking crises in credible fixed exchange rate regimes

Since monetary policy is constrained in fixed exchange rate regimes, we should observe fewer banking crises due to moral hazard in countries with credible currency pegs. However, three countries with seemingly credible pegs in the nineteen-eighties and -nineties, namely China, Hong Kong and Argentina, still suffered crises in their domestic banking sectors. The present note illustrates that bank incentives to take on excess risk still exist in countries with currency peg credibility and that the size of that risk exposure (and thus the potential for crisis) may be positively related to the level of central bank foreign exchange reserves.     

Bank regulation,property prices and early warning systems for banking crises in OECD countries

Early warning systems (EWS) for banking crises generally omit bank capital, bank liquidity and property prices. Most work on EWS has been for global samples dominated by emerging market crises where time series data on bank capital adequacy and property prices are typically absent. We estimate logit crisis models for OECD countries, finding strong effects from capital adequacy and liquidity ratios as well as property prices, and can exclude traditional variables. Higher capital adequacy and liquidity ratios have a marked effect on the crisis probabilities, implying long-run benefits to offset some of the costs that such regulations may impose.     

The liquidity of bank assets and banking stability

This paper shows that an increased liquidity of bank assets, paradoxically, increases banking instability and the externalities associated with banking failures. This is because even though higher asset liquidity directly benefits stability by encouraging banks to reduce the risks on their balance sheets and by facilitating the liquidation of assets in a crisis, it also makes crises less costly for banks. As a result, banks have an incentive to take on an amount of new risk that more than offsets the positive direct impact on stability.     

Reputational contagion and optimal regulatory forbearance

Existing studies suggest that systemic crises may arise because banks either hold correlated assets, or are connected by interbank lending. This paper shows that common regulation is also a conduit for interbank contagion. One bank's failure may undermine confidence in the banking regulator's competence, and, hence, in other banks chartered by the same regulator. As a result, depositors withdraw funds from otherwise unconnected banks. The optimal regulatory response to this behavior can be privately to exhibit forbearance to a failing bank. We show that regulatory transparency improves confidence ex ante but impedes regulators' ability to stem panics ex post.     

Bank failures and the cost of systemic risk: Evidence from 1900 to 1930

We measure the effect of bank failures on economic growth using data from 1900 to 1930, a period without active government stabilization policies and several severe banking crises. VAR model estimates suggest bank failures have long-lasting negative effects on economic growth. A bank failure shock involving one percent of system liabilities leads to a 6.5% reduction in GNP growth within three quarters and a measurable reduction for 10 quarters. Panel VAR model estimates for the 48 states show bank failures aggravate commercial non-bank failures. Institutional and regulatory features affect the intensity of the bank failure effect. We find that bank failures have a larger impact in states with deposit insurance, in states more heavily concentrated in agriculture, and in states with fewer large firms. However, because a number of states exhibit all three characteristics, we are not able to clearly identify the true marginal effects of these factors independently.     

How do bank competition,regulation, and institutions shape the real effect of banking crises? International evidence

This paper studies the influence of bank competition on the real effect of 36 systemic banking crises in 30 countries over the 1980–2000 period and how this influence varies across countries depending on bank regulation and institutions. We find that bank market power is not on average useful for mitigating the negative real effect of a systemic banking crisis. Market power promotes higher growth during normal times in industries that are more dependent on external finance but induces a bigger reduction in growth during systemic banking crises. We also find a country-specific effect depending on bank regulation and institutions. Stringent capital requirements and poor protection of creditor rights increase the benefits of bank market power for mitigating the negative real effect of a systemic banking crisis because bank market power has a positive effect on economic growth during both crisis and non-crisis periods in these environments.     

Liability taxes,risk, and the cost of banking crises

This study investigates the effects on risk and financial stability of the taxes on bank liabilities introduced across European countries after the global financial crisis. Using a difference-in-differences setup, we show that banks responded to the implementation of liability taxes by reducing their interbank exposure, and by increasing both equity, at least in the short term, and the risk weight of their assets. When we consider these adjustments in a microsimulation model for bank portfolio losses, we find that liability taxes reduce risk in the banking sector and could therefore decrease the cost of crises.     

Parliamentary election cycles and the Turkish banking sector

This paper analyzes the effects of parliamentary election cycles on the Turkish banking system. Using annual bank-level data representing all banks in Turkey during 1963–2007, we present evidence of meaningful differences in the structure of bank assets, liabilities and financial performance across different stages of the parliamentary election cycle. However, we find that government-owned banks’ behavior does not meaningfully differ from that of either domestic and foreign-owned private-sector banks before, during or after elections. Our estimates also show that government-owned banks underperform both domestic and foreign-owned private-sector counterparts.