The EONIA spread before and during the crisis of 2007–2009: The role of liquidity and credit risk

This paper provides an empirical assessment of the factors affecting the spread between the Euro Overnight Index Average (EONIA) and the main policy rate of the European Central Bank (ECB). Up until the period when Lehman Brothers collapsed in mid-September 2008, the spread was small and positive. After this point, the liquidity surplus that developed from the fixed rate full allotment tendering arrangement in refinancing operations drove the widening of EONIA spread (trading below the ECB policy rate), although other factors also played a significant role. This paper explains the drivers of spread across alternative non-crisis/crisis regimes. In addition, the paper examines how the EONIA spread reacts to shocks imposed on a range of liquidity and credit risk factors in alternative crisis/non-crisis regimes. The results have implications for factors that should be monitored closely across both regimes, and also the implications that this may have for steering an unsecured overnight rate in crisis times.     

Market liquidity and institutional trading during the 2007–8 financial crisis

This paper shows that institutional sell-side herding increased bid–ask spreads and liquidity risk during the 2007–8 financial crisis. Such an impact on liquidity is most pronounced in firms with large numbers of institutions that sold the same stocks, that is, have correlated trades. For the same reason, we find institutional investors with a dedicated, buy-and-hold, investment style to be the least likely to herd; their trading activity did not affect stock market liquidity during the crisis. Our results are robust to alternative explanations, different test specifications and consistent with recent theories highlighting the negative impact of institutional trading activity on market liquidity during a crisis.     

The microstructure of fear,the Fama–French factors and the global financial crisis of 2007 and 2008

We analyze minute by minute equity price data from 1 August 2005 to 31 October 2008 to study the relationship between the three sources of systematic risk in Fama and French's (1993) model and the market's expectation of total risk as represented by the VIX (the “fear factor”). Our findings confirm the predicted relationship between the equity risk-premium and risk (Merton, 1980). We find that the size-premium is driven by investors who are flying-to-quality (Abel, 1988; Barsky, 1989). We also find that investors became increasingly sensitive to changes in the VIX during the global financial crisis.     

Ambiguity shifts and the 2007–2008 financial crisis

Faced with doubts about the quality of information and the quality of modeling techniques, ambiguity-averse agents assign higher probabilities to lower utility states, leading to higher CDS premia and lower equity prices. Using data on financial institutions, I find that the sudden increases in credit spreads during the recent crisis can be explained by changes in the amount of ambiguity faced by market participants and changes in how the total amount of ambiguity was distributed between ambiguity about information quality and ambiguity about model quality.     

The role of jump dynamics in the risk–return relationship

Surprisingly, a positive risk–return relationship has not been consistently observed for the traditional GARCH in the mean model in other studies. In this paper, we employ a combination of the jump diffusion and GARCH model in the mean equation to test the risk–return relationship for U.S. stock returns. The results suggest a statistically significant relationship between risk and return if the risk measure includes components of smoothly changing variance and jump events.     

The role of investors’ objective financial knowledge on the assessment of risk disclosures in mutual fund advertisements

This study examined the role of investors’ objective financial knowledge in processing risk disclosures in mutual-fund advertisements. Investors were exposed to a mutual fund advertisement containing either a disclaimer mandated by regulatory bodies or a strongly worded warning label. Overall, the results showed that mandated disclaimers were ineffective in reducing investors’ return expectations and attitudes toward the advertised fund, regardless of the investors’ level of financial knowledge. However, strongly worded warning labels effectively impacted the return expectations and attitudes of low-knowledge investors, but not high-knowledge investors. That is, the impact of warning labels was dependent on the level of an investors’ financial knowledge; specifically, high-knowledge investors failed to discount past performance as a heuristic cue in their judgments. Importantly, this behavior of high-knowledge investors was not due to a familiarity effect; the risk disclosures were properly encoded and processed by knowledgeable investors. These results suggest that high-knowledge investors either possessed strongly held beliefs (for example, the ‘hot hand’ effect) that persevered even when exposed to the strongly worded warning, or they were overconfident in their judgments.     

Should investors invest in hedge fund-like mutual funds? Evidence from the 2007 financial crisis

This study empirically examines the value added for investors during the 2007–2009 financial crisis from hedge fund-like equity mutual funds, including 130/30, market neutral, and long/short equity funds. We find that based on the information ratio, all market neutral funds, top 90% of long/short funds, and top 25% of 130/30 funds outperform a long-only passive index fund over the crisis period. However, we find little evidence of abnormal performance by the average and median funds in our sample, based on either unconditional or conditional four-factor alphas. The reason for the overall under-performance in the crisis period is that while short positions taken by these funds do generate alpha, the gain from their short positions is not sufficiently large to offset the loss from their long positions. Finally, the abnormal performance of short positions is found to be attributable to managers’ characteristic-adjusted and industry-adjusted stock selection skills. One implication of this study is that even though market neutral and long/short funds on average may not generate alpha, investors can benefit from holding these funds, especially the former, that can provide a hedge against down markets due to their low betas and that can be useful for asset allocation.     

Corporate governance in the 2007–2008 financial crisis: Evidence from financial institutions worldwide

This paper investigates the influence of corporate governance on financial firms' performance during the 2007–2008 financial crisis. Using a unique dataset of 296 financial firms from 30 countries that were at the center of the crisis, we find that firms with more independent boards and higher institutional ownership experienced worse stock returns during the crisis period. Further exploration suggests that this is because (1) firms with higher institutional ownership took more risk prior to the crisis, which resulted in larger shareholder losses during the crisis period, and (2) firms with more independent boards raised more equity capital during the crisis, which led to a wealth transfer from existing shareholders to debtholders. Overall, our findings add to the literature by examining the corporate governance determinants of financial firms' performance during the 2007–2008 crisis.     

Causes of the great recession of 2007–2009: The financial crisis was the symptom not the disease!

Globalization has increasingly made it possible for labor in developing countries to augment labor in the developed world, without having to relocate, in ways not thought possible only a few decades ago. We argue that this large increase in the developed world’s effective labor supply, triggered by geo-political events and technological innovations, coupled with the inability of existing institutions in the US and developing nations themselves to cope with this shock, set the stage for the great recession. The financial crisis in the US was but the first acute symptom.     

Bank–firm relations and the role of Mutual Guarantee Institutions at the peak of the crisis

We examine the role played by Mutual Guarantee Institutions (MGIs) in the lending policies undertaken by banks at the peak of the Great Crisis of 2007–2009. We address this issue by using a large database on Italian firms built from the credit files of UniCredit banking Group and focusing on small business. We provide an empirical analysis of the determinants of the probability that a borrowing firm will suffer financial tension and obtain two main innovative findings. First, we find that small firms supported by MGIs less likely experienced financial tensions even at that time of utmost financial stress. Second, our empirical evidence shows that MGIs played a signaling role beyond the simple provision of collateral. This latter finding suggests that the information provided by MGIs turned out to be key for bank–firm relations as scoring and rating systems – being typically based on pro-cyclical indicators – had become less informative during the crisis.     

Baltic stock markets and the financial crisis of 2008–2009

This study presents new evidence on stock market integration by investigating the linkages between developed European stock markets and emerging stock markets. We focus on three countries in the Baltic region, namely Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania with particular attention to the recent financial crisis of 2008–2009. The study is motivated by traditional stock market studies of integration, which show that developed stock markets are highly integrated, while emerging markets may be segmented. How integrated these emerging stock markets are in a crisis period with respect to the EUROSTOXX50 stock index is an empirical question investigated in this study. While the results of this study demonstrate that the Baltic stock markets were apparently segmented before the crisis, they were highly integrated during the crisis. The results of the variance decomposition analysis show that a large proportion of the forecast variance of the Baltic stock markets can be explained by the EUROSTOXX50 during the crisis. The results from the quantile regressions demonstrate that during the crisis the returns of the lowest quantile were most sensitive to the EUROSTOXX50 stock index. All these results imply less diversification benefits during crises when investors would need them the most.     

Baltic stock markets and the financial crisis of 2008–2009

This study presents new evidence on stock market integration by investigating the linkages between developed European stock markets and emerging stock markets. We focus on three countries in the Baltic region, namely Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania with particular attention to the recent financial crisis of 2008–2009. The study is motivated by traditional stock market studies of integration, which show that developed stock markets are highly integrated, while emerging markets may be segmented. How integrated these emerging stock markets are in a crisis period with respect to the EUROSTOXX50 stock index is an empirical question investigated in this study. While the results of this study demonstrate that the Baltic stock markets were apparently segmented before the crisis, they were highly integrated during the crisis. The results of the variance decomposition analysis show that a large proportion of the forecast variance of the Baltic stock markets can be explained by the EUROSTOXX50 during the crisis. The results from the quantile regressions demonstrate that during the crisis the returns of the lowest quantile were most sensitive to the EUROSTOXX50 stock index. All these results imply less diversification benefits during crises when investors would need them the most.     

The 2007–2009 financial crisis and bank opaqueness

Doubts about the accuracy with which outside investors can assess a banking firm’s value motivate many government interventions in the banking market. Although the available empirical evidence is somewhat mixed, the recent financial crisis has reinforced a common assessment that banks are unusually opaque. This paper examines bank equity’s trading characteristics during “normal” periods and two “crisis” periods between 1993 and 2009. We find only limited (mixed) evidence that banks are unusually opaque during normal periods. However, consistent with theory, crises raise the adverse selection costs of trading bank shares relative to those of nonbank control firms. A bank’s balance sheet composition significantly affects its equity opacity, but we cannot detect specific balance sheet categories that have robust effects.     

Trading by bank insiders before and during the 2007–2008 financial crisis

This paper sheds new light on the role bank executives played in the financial crisis. It examines whether they foresaw the poor performance of their own bank by analyzing their insider trading patterns. Insider trading during 2006 predicts stock returns during the crisis: a portfolio strategy based on insider trading information earns a risk-adjusted return of over 40% during the crisis. Further, banks with a high exposure to the housing market and banks with a low exposure exhibit different insider trading patterns starting in mid-2006, when US housing prices first decline: insiders of high-exposure banks are 20% more likely to sell stock than insiders of low-exposure banks. This pattern is more pronounced for CEOs than other insiders. However, insider trading patterns of high- and low-exposure banks do not differ before 2006. Replacing high-exposure banks by too-big-too-fail banks yields similar results. This evidence indicates that insiders of high-exposure and too-big-too-fail banks revised their assessment of their banks’ investments following the reversal in the housing market.     

Domestic and foreign institutional investors’ behavior in China

This paper compares the investment characteristics between foreign funds operating under Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors (QFIIs) in China and domestic Chinese funds and analyzes the firm-level drivers that influence their allocation choices. The analysis reveals that foreign funds have a preference for a range of sectors such as transportation, metals and non-metals, and machinery, as opposed to industries with a requirement for local knowledge. The portfolios of domestic Chinese funds are distributed more evenly than those of the foreign funds. The comparative analysis indicates that foreign funds invest in firms that are significantly different from those favored by domestic funds in terms of size, profit, and compensation of management. Finally, we find that when making investment decisions, foreign funds tend to rely on some corporate governance indicators, which is not consistent with the results obtained from previous studies examining developed markets. In particular, foreign funds have a preference for firms with a high percentage of state-owned shares, while the reverse is the case for domestic funds. These empirical findings highlight the differences between QFII and domestic fund investment preferences and will be of value to policy-makers in emerging markets, and China, in particular, in gauging the important drivers of foreign investment.     

Firms as liquidity providers: Evidence from the 2007–2008 financial crisis

Using a supplier–client matched sample, we study the effect of the 2007–2008 financial crisis on between-firm liquidity provision. Consistent with a causal effect of a negative shock to bank credit, we find that firms with high precrisis liquidity levels increased the trade credit extended to other corporations and subsequently experienced better performance as compared with ex ante cash-poor firms. Trade credit taken by constrained firms increased during this period. These findings are consistent with firms providing liquidity insurance to their clients when bank credit is scarce and offer an important precautionary savings motive for accumulating cash reserves.     

International income risk-sharing and the global financial crisis of 2008–2009

We examine the impact of the global financial crisis on the degree of international income and consumption risk-sharing among industrial economies using returns on cross-border portfolio holdings (e.g., debt, equity, FDI). We split the returns from the net foreign holdings as receipts (inflows) and payments (outflows) to investigate which of the two sides exhibited the greater resilience for income risk-sharing during the recent crisis. First, we find that debt delivered better risk-sharing than equity, mainly reflecting the deficit deterioration in EMU countries during the post-crisis period. FDI, by contrast, did not correspond to noticeable risk diversification. Second, separating output shocks into positive and negative components reveals that debt holding receipts (equity liability payments) performed better under negative (positive) realizations of the shock variable. Third, the unwinding of capital flows resulted in a sharp fall in income dis-smoothing via the debt liability channel in the new EU countries.     

The effects of news events on market contagion: Evidence from the 2007–2009 financial crisis

In this paper, we use the quantile regression technique along with coexceedance, a contagion measure, to assess the extent to which news events contribute to contagion in the stock markets during the crisis period between 2007 and 2009. Studies have shown that, not only the subprime crisis leads to a global recession, but the effects on the global stock markets have also been significant. We track the news events, both in the UK and the US, using the global recession timeline. We observe that the news events related to ad hoc bailouts of individual banks from the UK have a contagion effect throughout the period for most of the countries under investigation. This, however, is not found to be the case for the news events originating from the US. Our findings regarding the evidence of contagion effects in the UK reinforce the argument that spreads and contagion—an outcome of the risk perception of financial markets—are solely a result of the behaviour of investors or other financial market participants.     

The impact of the global financial crisis on the cross-currency linkage of LIBOR–OIS spreads

This article examines the impact of global financial crisis on cross-currency linkage of the LIBOR–OIS spread, a financial stress measure in interbank markets. The impulse response analysis is conducted in a multivariate setting, adopting the bias-corrected bootstrap as a means of statistical inference. The overall evidence suggests that the crisis has substantially changed the nature of the cross-currency interactions in liquidity stress. Also global money markets have failed to contain stress in US dollar funding and the role of the Japanese yen as a liquidity source appears to be significant, while these two currencies drive the cross-currency system of liquidity stress.     

Pricing of commercial real estate securities during the 2007–2009 financial crisis

We study the relative and absolute pricing of CMBX contracts (commercial real estate derivatives) during the recent financial crisis. Using a structural CMBX pricing model, we find little systematic mispricing relative to REIT equity and options. We do find short-term deviations from this relative pricing relationship that are statistically and economically significant. In particular, the CMBX market temporarily overreacts to news announcements. We provide evidence that this temporary mispricing is caused by price pressure due to hedging activities. Finally, an absolute pricing analysis provides no substantial evidence that CMBX contracts traded at fire sale levels during the crisis.