Political Uncertainty and Bank Loan Contracts: Does Government Quality Matter?

Journal of Financial Services Research - We investigate the relation between political uncertainty and bank loan spreads using a sample of loan contracts for the G20 firms during the period from...     

Fair Lending Analysis of Mortgage Pricing: Does Underwriting Matter?

This paper evaluates the impact of underwriting decision on fair lending risk assessments of loan pricing. Using data from one national bank that contain a rich set of decisioning variables, we compare the estimation results from the single equation model with those from the sample selection type of models. Then we conduct three simulation studies to evaluate the sample selection bias and omitted variable bias under various scenarios. We demonstrate that the single equation approach could potentially generate biased estimates of pricing disparities when it fails to consider the impact of the underwriting decision.     

Does a Bank’s Loan Screening and Monitoring Matter?

We investigate the relationship between the borrower’s abnormal loan announcement return and the bank’s loan screening and monitoring using a new ex-ante proxy for loan screening and monitoring. While recent studies have suggested that bank loan relationships and related loan screening and monitoring services may no longer matter, we find significant loan announcement returns over the 1995–1999 period and, controlling for borrower and loan characteristics, a statistically significant positive relationship between the proxy and the borrower’s standardized CAR. While consistent with a bank’s loan screening and monitoring adding value to the borrower, the economic effect is relatively small.

Bank Liquidity Creation and Risk‐Taking: Does Managerial Ability Matter?

This study investigates the impact of managerial ability on banks' liquidity creation and risk‐taking behavior. We find that higher ability managers create more liquidity and take more risk. During times of financial crisis, however, higher ability bank managers reduce liquidity creation as a way to de‐leverage their balance sheets. Our findings inform recent theoretical and empirical studies that investigate determinants of liquidity creation and risk by introducing managerial ability as a prominent antecedent of the banks' intermediation and risk‐transforming service. Moreover, this study has policy‐related implications, since managerial ability can be quantified as a key performance indicator for prudential supervision of banks and could help regulators to target intervention efforts more purposefully during times of crisis.     

Does Fair Value Accounting Exacerbate the Procyclicality of Bank Lending?

This study investigates whether fair value accounting contributes to the procyclicality of bank lending. Using banks’ approval/denial decisions on residential mortgage applications to capture banks’ supply of credit, I find no evidence that fair value accounting has procyclical effects on bank lending over the past two business cycles. I further identify two reasons for this result. First, the main accounting item distinguishing fair value accounting from historical cost accounting—unrealized gains and losses on available‐for‐sale securities—does not affect lending decisions. Second, unrealized gains and losses on available‐for‐sale securities are not procyclical, as the risk‐free interest rate rises during some expansionary periods, resulting in unrealized losses, while the risk‐free interest rate (and sometimes the default spread) falls during some recessionary periods, resulting in unrealized gains.     

Monitoring Managers: Does It Matter?

We study how well‐incentivized boards monitor CEOs and whether monitoring improves performance. Using unique, detailed data on boards' information sets and decisions for a large sample of private equity–backed firms, we find that gathering information helps boards learn about CEO ability. “Soft” information plays a much larger role than hard data, such as the performance metrics that prior literature focuses on, and helps avoid firing a CEO for bad luck or in response to adverse external shocks. We show that governance reforms increase the effectiveness of board monitoring and establish a causal link between forced CEO turnover and performance improvements.     

Does Endogenously Determined Ownership Matter on Performance? Dynamic Evidence from the Emerging Taiwan Market

This paper reexamines the relationship between ownership and firm performance. Using an unbalanced panel data in the emerging Taiwan market, we adopt a simultaneous equations framework to explore the persistence of the relationship across the life cycle of firms over time. Empirical results suggest that firm performance is a function of institutional ownership, especially in the mature stage. Through dynamic specification, evidence appears to account for lack of persistence of the impacts of ownership on performance over time. To alleviate a potential simultaneity issue, we construct a lagged specification to examine the sensitivity of our results. Consequently, the main results are found to be robust.     

Identity Theft and Consumer Payment Choice: Does Security Really Matter?

In their paper “Spectral Risk Measures: Properties and Limitations”, Dowd et al. (J Financ Serv Res 341:61–75, 2008) introduce exponential and power spectral risk measures as subclasses of spectral risk measures (SRMs) to the literature, and claim that they are subject to three serious limitations: First, for these subclasses, the spectral risk may be counterintuitively decreasing when the user’s risk aversion is increasing. Second, these subclasses, and power SRMs in particular, become completely insensitive to market volatility when the respective parameters of risk aversion tend to their lower and upper boundaries. Third, exponential SRMs exhibit constant absolute risk aversion, while constant relative risk aversion better meets the empirical evidence. Consequently, “users of spectral risk measures must be careful to select utility functions that fit the features of the particular problems they are dealing with, and should be especially careful when using power SRMs.” (p. 61). In this comment, we show that the findings of Dowd et al. (J Financ Serv Res 341:61–75, 2008) suffer from misinterpretations and wrong conclusions.     

How Do Central Bank Governors Matter? Regulation and the Financial Sector

Do past employment characteristics of central bank governors affect financial regulation? To answer this question, we construct a new data set based on curriculum vitae of all central bank governors around the world in 1970–2011. We interpret work experiences as indicators of preferences toward deregulation. Over the average duration in office (5.6 years), a governor with financial sector experience is associated with three times more deregulation than a governor without experience in finance. Similar results hold for past experience at the IMF; in contrast, past experience at the BIS and the UN are associated with less deregulation.     

Does Competition Affect Bank Risk?

Although policymakers often discuss trade-offs between bank competition and stability, past research provides differing theoretical perspectives and empirical results on the impact of competition on risk. We employ a new approach for identifying exogenous changes in the competitive pressures facing individual banks and discover that an intensification of competition materially boosts bank risk. With respect to the mechanisms, we find that competition reduces banks’ profits, pricing power, and charter values and increases banks’ provision of nontraditional, riskier banking services and lending to riskier firms.     

Climate Change, Agriculture, and Developing Countries: Does Adaptation Matter?

Because most developing countries depend heavily on agriculture,the effects of global warming on productive croplands are likelyto threaten both the welfare of the population and the economicdevelopment of the countries. Tropical regions in the developingworld are particularly vulnerable to potential damage from environmentalchanges because the poor soils that cover large areas of theseregions already have made much of the land unusable for agriculture. Although agronomic simulation models predict that higher temperatureswill reduce grain yields as the cool wheat-growing areas getwarmer, they have not examined the possibility that farmerswill adapt by making production decisions that are in theirown best interests. A recent set of models examines cross-sectionalevidence from India and Brazil and finds that even though theagricultural sector is sensitive to climate, individual farmersdo take local climates into account, and their ability to doso will help mitigate the impacts of global warming.      

Bank ownership and stock price informativeness. Does politics matter?

This study investigates the effects of ownership on the informativeness of the stock prices of 636 commercial banks from 59 countries for 2002–2014. We find strong and robust evidence that state ownership is associated with stock prices having less information in developing countries. This result is consistent with the conjecture that state ownership is associated with a less transparent environment that discourages investors from trading on private information. Furthermore, we find that politics magnifies the effect of state ownership on the informativeness of stock prices during election years. In particular, we show that stock prices are less informative for state ownership in countries with civil law or parliamentary systems. These findings shows that the political channel plays an important role in determining the expropriation by government shareholders, especially in developing countries.     

Does Interbank Borrowing Reduce Bank Risk?

In this paper we investigate whether banks that borrow from other banks have lower risk levels. We concentrate on a large sample of Central and Eastern European banks that allows us to explore the impact of interbank lending when exposures are long term and interbank borrowers are small banks. The results of the empirical analysis generally confirm the hypothesis that long-term interbank exposures result in lower risk of the borrowing banks.     

Does Ownership Identity Matter? A Meta‐analysis of Research on Firm Financial Performance in Relation to Government versus Private Ownership

We examine whether reported ownership–performance relations systematically differ for government versus private ownership by integrating the diverse empirical results for listed corporations in emerging markets. Our meta‐analysis confirms popular perceptions that, compared to private ownership, government ownership is associated with inferior performance. We find that, on average, the underlying ownership–performance relation is negative for government ownership and positive for private ownership, and the difference between these relations is significant. We also find that the positive private ownership–performance relation is stronger for institutional/foreign ownership compared to family/management ownership. Further analysis shows that negative (positive) government (private) ownership and performance relations have weakened (strengthened) over time. Our assessment of the sources of heterogeneity shows that reported relations are biased by estimation methods that fail to adequately control for endogeneity. Our results suggest that the nature of ownership–performance relations in emerging markets remains very dynamic and warrants ongoing research interest.     

R2: Does it Matter for Firm Valuation?

A considerable amount of research has been devoted to why R² differs across firms or markets, but little attention has been paid to the consequences of this difference. We fill this gap by investigating how differing R² affects investors’ assessment of firm value. Using a sample of 90,111 firm‐year observations from 1970 to 2004, we find that higher R² leads to higher firm valuation and that, on average, high‐R² firms experience significant underperformance in the long run. These results suggest that high‐R² firms tend to be overpriced.     

Too Dispersed to Monitor? Ownership Dispersion,Monitoring, and the Prediction of Bank Distress

This paper conducts an empirical assessment of the theories stating that ownership concentration improves the quality of shareholders’ monitoring. In contrast with other studies, we do not use regressions of risk/performance on ownership concentration. Instead, we build an early warning model of bank distress that includes a leading indicator derived from banks’ share price, the Merton‐KMV distance to default (DD). The significance of this indicator depends on the efficacy of shareholders’ monitoring. On a sample of European banks, we show that the predictive power of the DD is satisfactory only when banks’ shareholding is characterized by the presence of blockholders.