The role of securitization in bank liquidity and funding management

This paper studies the role of securitization in bank management. I propose a new index of “bank loan portfolio liquidity” which can be thought of as a weighted average of the potential to securitize loans of a given type, where the weights reflect the composition of a bank loan portfolio. I use this new index to show that by allowing banks to convert illiquid loans into liquid funds, securitization reduces banks' holdings of liquid securities and increases their lending ability. Furthermore, securitization provides banks with an additional source of funding and makes bank lending less sensitive to cost of funds shocks. By extension, the securitization weakens the ability of the monetary authority to affect banks' lending activity but makes banks more susceptible to liquidity and funding crisis when the securitization market is shut down.     

Capital Market Regimes and Bank Structure in Europe

We hypothesize that fundamental features that distinguish European capital markets have predictably influenced emerging national differences in bank capitalization and loan growth. Using bank‐level data from 13 European countries, 1998 to 2004, we find evidence of positive effects of “equity‐friendly” market features on bank capitalization and positive effects of both “equity‐friendly” and “credit‐friendly” market features on loan growth. The findings are strongest in small banks and in banks with cooperative charters. Our results suggest that ongoing and prospective integration of European banking markets is mitigated by relatively static features of the equity and credit markets on which banks rely.     

Loan growth and riskiness of banks

We investigate whether loan growth affects the riskiness of individual banks in 16 major countries. Using Bankscope data from more than 16,000 individual banks during 1997–2007, we test three hypotheses on the relation between abnormal loan growth and asset risk, bank profitability, and bank solvency. We find that loan growth leads to an increase in loan loss provisions during the subsequent three years, to a decrease in relative interest income, and to lower capital ratios. Further analyses show that loan growth also has a negative impact on the risk-adjusted interest income. These results suggest that loan growth represents an important driver of the riskiness of banks.     

Do Investment Banks Have Incentives to Help Clients Make Value‐Creating Acquisitions?

Many have long suspected that investment banks, when advising corporate clients on potential acquisitions, have strong incentives just to “get the deal done” with little if any motive for urging clients to walk away from “bad” deals. The incentive to complete deals comes from compensation arrangements in which the bulk of the bankers' fees depend upon completion of the deals. Several earlier studies have provided support for this suspicion by reporting findings that show banks' market shares of advisory services depending mainly on two variables—their previous market shares and their deal completion rate—with little if any connection to the value created (or destroyed) for their clients' shareholders. In their recently published study, the authors revisit that relationship and reach a number of different conclusions: (1) advisors in acquisitions that create more value for clients are more likely to be chosen for future deals; (2) the changes in bankers' advisory market shares are strongly related to the value created for prior clients; and (3) the changes in banks' market values are positively correlated with the value created for their acquirer clients. In sum, the findings suggest that banks have significant market‐related incentives to advise their clients to pursue value‐creating acquisitions and to avoid deals likely to reduce their market values.     

A Test of the Law of One Price in Retail Banking

This paper investigates the level and the determinants of retail banking interest rate differences among Spanish banks in the period 1989–2003. We find that the interest rates of twenty five different bank loan and deposit products adjust rather rapidly to their long-term values in response to external shocks, as the relative version of the Law of One Price predicts, but the evidence runs contrary to the absolute version of the Law. Credit risk premium, part of the marginal cost of the loans granted by a particular bank, is an important source of interest rate dispersion across banks and loan products, both before and after Spain joined the Euro zone. Therefore, differences in credit risk policies across banks must be taken into account when forming expectations about European retail banking integration.     

Ownership structure,risk and performance in the European banking industry

We compare the performance and risk of a sample of 181 large banks from 15 European countries over the 1999–2004 period and evaluate the impact of alternative ownership models, together with the degree of ownership concentration, on their profitability, cost efficiency and risk. Three main results emerge. First, after controlling for bank characteristics, country and time effects, mutual banks and government-owned banks exhibit a lower profitability than privately owned banks, in spite of their lower costs. Second, public sector banks have poorer loan quality and higher insolvency risk than other types of banks while mutual banks have better loan quality and lower asset risk than both private and public sector banks. Finally, while ownership concentration does not significantly affect a bank’s profitability, a higher ownership concentration is associated with better loan quality, lower asset risk and lower insolvency risk. These differences, along with differences in asset composition and funding mix, indicate a different financial intermediation model for the different ownership forms.     

How the Internet affects output and performance at community banks

Internet web sites have become an important alternative distribution channel for most banking institutions. However, we still know little about the impact of this delivery channel on bank performance. We observe 424 community banks among the first wave of US banks to adopt transactional banking web sites in the late-1990s, and compare the change in their 1999–2001 financial performance to that of 5175 branching-only community banks. Whereas today virtually all viable community banking franchises offer the Internet banking channel, studying this earlier time period allows us to make clean comparisons between subsamples of “brick-and-mortar” and “click-and-mortar” community banks. We find that Internet adoption improved community bank profitability, chiefly through increased revenues from deposit service charges. Internet adoption was also associated with movements of deposits from checking accounts to money market deposit accounts, increased use of brokered deposits, and higher average wage rates for bank employees. We find little evidence of changes in loan portfolio mix. Our findings suggest that these initial click-and-mortar banks (and their customers) used the Internet channel as a complement to, rather than a substitute for, physical branches.     

Bank audit practices and loan loss provisioning

I empirically examine the evolution of loan loss accounting across banks that differ categorically by external auditing practice. Using a partial adjustment model, and a sample of 75,505 observations on affiliated banks, 1995–2009, I find evidence of convergence across audit categories in target ratios of provisions for loan losses to nonaccrual loans. This is consistent with a standardized method of accounting for “impaired” loans. I observe less convergence, on the other hand, in target ratios of provisions for loan losses to loans, which appears to accommodate a role for managerial discretion.     

Determinants of the Loan Loss Allowance: Some Cross‐Country Comparisons

This paper analyzes the determinants of banks' loan loss allowance for samples of U.S. banks and three non‐U.S. samples: a group of 21 countries, Canada, and Japan. The model includes fundamental (or nondiscretionary) determinants of the allowance, such as nonperforming loans, and discretionary determinants, such as income before the loan loss provision. The results suggest that the loan loss allowance is sensitive to preprovision income in almost all samples. However, the results also suggest that some variables thought to reflect fundamental factors in U.S. analysis, such as net charge‐offs, are not significant factors for non‐U.S. banks.     

Loan managers’ trust and credit access for SMEs

Research on relationship lending pays only marginal attention to the role of loan managers’ trust in the managers of SMEs. Trust literature suggests that trust reduces agency costs. Thus, trust is expected to be positively related to the amount of short-term credit granted and negatively related to SMEs’ risk of being credit constrained. Results from six banks characterised by a German culture and three banks characterised by an Italian culture suggest that this is indeed the case: SMEs that enjoy a high level of trust from loan managers obtain more credit and are less credit constrained.     

The effects of firm-initiated clawback provisions on bank loan contracting

Although firm-initiated clawbacks reduce accounting manipulation, they also induce managers to engage in suboptimal activities (e.g., reduce research and development (R&D) expenses) to achieve earnings targets. To assess the effectiveness of clawback provisions, we examine their impact from debtholders' point of view. We find that banks use more financial covenants and performance pricing provisions in the loan contracts and decrease interest rates after firms initiate clawbacks. Moreover, we also find that loan maturity increases and loan collateral decreases subsequent to clawback adoption. Taken together, our findings indicate that firm-initiated clawback provisions enhance financial reporting quality, thereby reducing the information uncertainty that financing providers face.     

Bank incentives and suboptimal lending decisions: Evidence from the valuation effect of bank loan announcements in Japan

Using a sample of bank loan announcements in Japan, we examine whether or not banks have incentives to engage in suboptimal lending that results in wealth transfer from the banks to the borrowing firms. We find that abnormal returns for borrowing firms are significantly positive, but those for lending banks are sometimes significantly negative. Furthermore, the announcement returns for borrowing firms are negatively related to those for lending banks, especially when poorly performing firms borrow from financially healthy (low-risk) banks. Our results suggest that the positive valuation effect of bank loan announcements for borrowing firms is mainly due to a wealth transfer from lending banks.     

Internal and external analysis of community banks' performance

This study explores the efficiency of US community banks and factors that affect it. We present a slacks-based measure model for data envelopment analysis to analyze the efficiency of 3171 community banks in the US, and then conduct a panel data analysis to investigate the factors that affect banks' efficiency. The results show that bank size, community size, and unemployment rate of the region where the community bank is located are positively related to the efficiency, whereas relative affluence of a community has a negative relationship with the community bank efficiency. In addition, community banks providing real estate loans or diversifying their loan services perform better than those concentrating on agricultural loans, which account for a large proportion of the loans provided by US community banks whose traditional role is to provide banking services to rural communities and act as major credit providers for agricultural producers.     

The performance of banks around the receipt and repayment of TARP funds: Over-achievers versus under-achievers

In this paper, we look at how the pre-crisis health of banks is related to the probability of receiving and repaying TARP capital. We find that financial performance characteristics that are related to the probability of receiving TARP funds differ for the healthiest (“over-achiever”) versus the least healthy (“under-achiever”) banks. We find that TARP under-achievers have some, but not consistent, weaknesses in income production. These banks also are experiencing liquidity issues as customers, shut out of public debt markets, get bank loans through drawdowns of loan commitments. Unlike TARP under-achievers, TARP over-achievers’ loans are performing well. Yet, liquidity issues (from low levels of liquid assets and core deposits and drawdowns of loan commitments) hurt the abilities of these banks to continue their lending. Differences between under-achiever and over-achiever banks are also found for repayment and deadbeat TARP banks.     

Foreign bank entry,credit allocation and lending rates in emerging markets: Empirical evidence from Poland

Earlier studies have documented that foreign banks charge lower lending rates and interest spreads than domestic banks. We hypothesize that this may stem from the superior efficiency of foreign entrants that they decide to pass onto borrowers (“performance hypothesis”), but could also reflect a different loan allocation with respect to borrower transparency, loan maturity and currency (“portfolio composition hypothesis”). We are able to differentiate between the above hypotheses thanks to a novel dataset containing detailed bank-specific information for the Polish banking industry. Our findings demonstrate that banks differ significantly in terms of portfolio composition and we attest to the “portfolio composition hypothesis” by showing that, having controlled for portfolio composition, there are no differences in lending rates between banks.     

Coincident correlations of growth and cash flow in banking

Prior empirical research indicates that loan growth in the banking industry is positively related to cash flow. I offer an alternative methodology that is better able to capture the effect of cash flow on loan growth while controlling for the potentially coincident effect of loan growth on cash flow. Using a sample of 171,389 observations on banks, 1986–2007, I find that causality runs more consistently from growth to cash flow than from cash flow to growth. This extends prior empirical research by Houston and James (1998) and Campello (2002) on cash flow sensitivities in the banking industry.     

Bank Consolidation and Small Business Lending: The Role of Community Banks

This paper examines how bank consolidation activity affected small business lending in local U.S. banking markets during two 3-year study periods, focussing on the role played by community banks in the process. During the 1994–1997 period, we find that consolidation activity involving big banks is associated with lower loan growth, whereas community bank consolidations and a greater presence of community banks in the market are associated with higher loan growth. During the 1997–2000 period, consolidation activity is either unrelated to small business loan growth or is associated with higher loan growth. In both study periods we find that, net of organization reclassifications due to consolidation or asset growth, the share of small business lending funded by community banks rose, particularly in markets undergoing consolidation.     

Securitization,risk-transferring and financial instability: The case of Spain

The 2007–2010 financial crisis has hit a variety of countries asymmetrically. The case of Spain is particularly illustrative as it exemplifies in a vivid manner most of the core issues largely responsible for the crisis. This country experienced a pronounced housing bubble partly funded via spectacular developments in its securitization markets leading to looser credit standards and subsequent financial stability problems. We analyze the sequential deterioration of credit in Spain considering rating changes in securitized deals. Using a sample of 20,286 observations on securities and rating changes from 2000Q1 to 2010Q1 we build a model in which loan growth, on balance-sheet credit quality and rating changes are estimated simultaneously. Our results suggest that loan growth significantly affects on balance-sheet loan performance with a lag of at least two years. Additionally, loan performance is found to explain rating changes with a lag of four quarters. Importantly, bank characteristics (in particular, observed solvency, cash-flow generation and cost efficiency) also affect ratings considerably. Additionally, these other bank characteristics seem to a higher weight in the rating changes of securities issued by savings banks as compared with commercial banks.     

Characteristics of failed U.S. commercial banks: an exploratory study

This study uses survival analysis to determine how early the indications of bank failure can be observed. We find that banks with high loan to asset and high personal loan to assets ratios are more likely to survive. Older banks and banks with high real estate and agricultural loans, loan loss allowance, loan charges off and non‐performing loans to assets ratio are more likely to fail. It is possible to predict survival functions of <50% for failed banks, 3 years or less before failure. Moreover, we find that most of the variables present a behaviour that departs from Benford’s Law.     

Deregulation,Correspondent Banking,and the Role of the Federal Reserve

Intrastate branching deregulation allowed correspondent banks to enter downstream retail deposit markets. Integrated correspondent banks may engage in vertical foreclosure, raising prices to downstream rivals or extracting valuable competitive information. The Federal Reserve would then tend to gain market share from private correspondent banks. Deregulation of restrictions on the formation of multibank holding companies, in contrast, allowed other correspondents to enter, increasing competition. We test these hypotheses using a panel data set of respondent account balances. We find that the Federal Reserve became a more important supplier of correspondent services following branching deregulation and that market power in the correspondent market declined following multibank holding company deregulation. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D43, G21, G28, L11.