The Risk‐Taking Channel of Monetary Policy: Exploring All Avenues

The literature on the risk‐taking channel of monetary policy grew quickly, leading to scattered evidence. We examine this channel through different angles, exploring detailed information on loan origination and performance. Ex ante riskier borrowers receive more funding at the extensive margin when interest rates are lower. Ex post performance is independent of the level of interest rates at origination. Still, loans granted in periods of very low and stable interest rates show higher default rates once interest rates start to increase. Risk‐taking is stronger among banks with lower capital ratios, suggesting that this channel may be linked to managerial incentives for risk‐shifting.     

The Risk‐Taking Channel of Monetary Policy in the U.S.: Evidence from Corporate Loan Data

To study the presence of a risk‐taking channel in the U.S., we build a comprehensive data set from the syndicated corporate loan market and measure monetary policy using different measures, most notably Taylor (1993) and Romer and Romer (2004) residuals. We identify a negative relation between monetary policy rates and bank risk‐taking, especially in the run up to the 2007 financial crisis. However, this effect is purely supply‐side driven only when using Taylor residuals and an ex ante measure of bank risk‐taking. Our results highlight the sensitivity of the potency of the risk‐taking channel to the measures of monetary policy innovations.     

The impact of monetary policy on the financing behaviour of firms in the Euro area and the UK

Abstract

According to the ‘broad credit view’ bank-dependent firms are more strongly affected by monetary contractions than firms with access to non-bank forms of external finance. Within the credit view the bank lending channel focuses on the special role of bank loans, and predicts that monetary contractions reduce loan supply to firms facing information problems. However, the ‘relationship lending channel’ argues that, especially in bank-based economies, bank-dependent firms have close ties with banks, which may reduce the sensitivity of their use of bank debt to monetary shocks. The sensitivity of corporate debt structures to changes in the monetary policy stance is analysed using a sample of 22,000 firms in the Euro area and the UK. Evidence is found for the credit view, the relationship lending channel, but not for the bank lending channel.     

The Determinants of Financial Structure: New Insights from Business Start‐ups

Business start‐ups lack prior history and reputation, face high failure risk, and have highly concentrated ownership. The resulting information and incentive problems, combined with entrepreneurial private benefits of control, affect initial financing decisions. This paper examines simultaneously the impact of these issues on leverage, debt mix and maturity. We find that start‐ups with high adverse selection and risk shifting problems contract less bank debt but compensate with other debt sources. Start‐ups in growing industries have lower leverage, but raise more bank debt. Entrepreneurs with large private control benefits contract less but longer term bank loans to lower the default probability.     

The Bank Lending Channel Revisited

A central proposition in research on the role of banks in the transmission mechanism is that monetary policy imparts a direct impact on deposits and that deposits act as the driving force of bank lending. This paper argues that the emphasis on policy‐induced changes in deposits is misplaced. A reformulation of the bank lending channel is proposed that works primarily through the impact of monetary policy on banks’ balance sheet strength and risk perception. Such a recasting implies, contrary to conventional wisdom, that greater reliance on market‐based funding enhances the importance of the channel.     

Sovereign risk and the bank lending channel in Europe

The main purpose of this article is to analyze how sovereign risk influences the loan supply reaction of banks to monetary policy through the bank lending channel. Additionally, we aim to test whether this reaction differs in easy and tight monetary regimes. Using a sample of 3125 banks from the euro zone between 1999 and 2012, we find that sovereign risk plays an important role in determining loan supply from banks during tight monetary regimes. Banks in higher sovereign risk countries reduce lending more during tight regimes. However, we find little evidence to support any relationship between sovereign risk and loan supply reaction to monetary policy expansions. These results are very interesting for the way monetary policy is conducted in Europe. Banking union, banking system strength, and the budget control of governments would be necessary measures to reduce the heterogeneous transmission of the monetary policy in the euro zone.     

Macroeconomic Factors and Microlevel Bank Behavior

We analyze the link between banks and the macroeconomy using a model that extends a macroeconomic VAR for the U.S. with a set of factors summarizing conditions in about 1,500 commercial banks. We investigate how macroeconomic shocks are transmitted to individual banks and obtain the following main findings. Backward‐looking risk of a representative bank declines, and bank lending increases following expansionary shocks. Forward‐looking risk increases following an expansionary monetary policy shock. There is, however, substantial heterogeneity in the transmission of macroeconomic shocks, which is due to bank size, capitalization, liquidity, risk, and the exposure to real estate and consumer loans.     

The Effect of Credit Risk on Bank and Bank Holding Company Bond Yields: Evidence from the Post-FDICIA Period

In this article we examine whether the federal safety net is viewed by the market as being extended beyond de jure deposits to other bank debt and even the debt of bank holding companies (BHCs). We extend previous research by focusing on the post‐FDICIA period and by examining the risk‐return relation of bonds issued directly by banks, not BHCs. Our results provide evidence that both bank and BHC bonds are priced by the secondary market in relation to their underlying credit risk, particularly for less capitalized issuers, suggesting that proposals requiring banks to issue subordinated debt may enhance market monitoring and discipline and be useful in supplementing regulatory discipline.     

Monetary Policy and the Asset Risk‐Taking Channel

How important is the risk‐taking channel for monetary policy? To answer this question, we develop and estimate a quantitative monetary DSGE model where banks choose excessively risky investments, due to an agency problem that distorts banks' incentives. As the real interest rate declines, these distortions become more important and excessive risk taking increases, lowering the efficiency of investment. We show theoretically that this novel transmission channel generates a new monetary policy trade‐off between inflation and real interest rate stabilization, whereby the central bank may prefer to tolerate greater inflation volatility in order to lower excessive risk taking.     

Corporate Debt Structure and the Financial Crisis

We present a DSGE model where firms optimally choose among alternative instruments of external finance. The model is used to explain the evolving composition of corporate debt during the financial crisis of 2008–09, namely, the observed shift from bank finance to bond finance, at a time when the cost of market debt rose above the cost of bank loans. We show that the flexibility offered by banks on the terms of their loans and firms' ability to substitute among alternative instruments of debt finance are important to shield the economy from adverse real effects of a financial crisis.     

Does competition influence the bank lending channel in the euro area?

This paper examines how competition influences the bank lending channel in the euro area countries. Using a large panel of banks from 12 euro area countries for the period 2002–2010 we analyze the reaction of loan supply to monetary policy actions depending on the degree of bank competition. We find that the effect of monetary policy on bank lending is dependent on bank competition: the transmission of monetary policy via the bank lending channel is less pronounced for banks with extensive market power. Further investigation shows that banks with less market power were more sensitive to monetary policy only before the financial crisis. These results suggest that bank market power has a significant impact on the effectiveness of monetary policy. Therefore, wide variations in the level of bank market power may lead to asymmetric effects of the single monetary policy.     

Monetary policy,ownership structure,and risk-taking at financial intermediaries

This paper examines how ownership structure interacts with monetary policy in shaping financial intermediaries' appetite for risk. By constructing a large panel of banks across Western Europe, we provide evidence that differences in bank ownership influence the transmission of monetary policy via the risk-taking channel. While shareholder banks actively adjust the riskiness of their portfolios to changes in interest rates, stakeholder banks appear to be less responsive to such changes. These findings call for greater attention to the nature of bank ownership when setting monetary policy.     

Firm balance sheets and monetary policy transmission

The functioning of internal capital markets in financial conglomerates facilitates a novel identification strategy of the balance sheet channel of monetary policy. We look at small subsidiary banks that are affiliated with the same holding company but operate in different geographical areas. These banks face the same marginal cost of funds due to internal capital markets, but face different borrowers as they concentrate their lending with small local businesses. Exploring cross-sectional variation in local economic conditions across these subsidiaries, we investigate whether borrower creditworthiness influences the response of bank lending to monetary policy. Our results are consistent with a demand-driven transmission mechanism that works through firm balance sheets and is independent from the bank lending channel.     

Distance to default,subordinated debt,and distress indicators in the banking industry*

The recent financial crisis has highlighted the inadequacy of present supervisory arrangements to identify reliable ex‐ante indicators of banking distress. For a sample of US bank holding companies, we analyse the extent to which distance to default based on market data can be explained using accounting‐based indicators of risk. We show that a larger number of bank fundamentals help predict default for institutions that issue subordinated debt. For banks that issue sub‐debt, we find that higher charter values and low bank capitalizations further increase the power of bank fundamentals to predict default risk.     

The dampening effect of bank foreign liabilities on monetary policy: Revisiting monetary cooperation in East Asia

This paper addresses the cost of formal monetary cooperation from the perspective of monetary policy effectiveness. As banks tend to borrow from abroad in foreign currencies to fund domestic lending, monetary policy may have a reduced effect on the credit market and the economy. Results derived from bank level data in East Asia indicate that bank foreign liabilities significantly reduce the effectiveness of the credit channel of monetary policy, implying a relatively low cost of giving up monetary autonomy.     

Consolidation in banking and the lending channel of monetary transmission: Evidence from Asia and Latin America

This paper examines the relationship between increased consolidation in banking and monetary policy transmission in eighteen Asian and Latin American economies, using bank-level data from 1996 to 2006. Our results provide consistent evidence that as concentration in banking increases, the bank lending channel is weakened, leading the monetary policy transmission mechanism to be less effective. We also investigate how this relationship between concentration and the strength of the lending channel depends on bank-specific characteristics. Using bank-level balance sheet and income statement data allows us, first, to better identify the effects of banking consolidation on the supply-side bank lending channel from those of the demand-side interest rate channel, and second, to test for any systematic differences in the impact of consolidation on monetary policy transmission across banks of different size and financial strength. We also discuss potential explanations for and policy implications of the main findings of this paper.     

Bank risk and monetary policy

We find evidence of a bank lending channel operating in the euro area via bank risk. Financial innovation and the wider use of new ways of transferring credit risk have tended to diminish the informational content of standard bank balance sheet indicators. We show that bank risk conditions, as perceived by financial market investors, need to be considered, together with the other indicators (i.e., size, liquidity and capitalization), traditionally used in the bank lending channel literature to assess banks’ ability and willingness to supply new loans. Using a large sample of European banks, we find that banks characterized by lower expected default frequency are able to offer a larger amount of credit and to better insulate their loan supply from monetary policy changes.     

Implications of bank ownership for the credit channel of monetary policy transmission: Evidence from India

Using bank-level data from India, we examine the impact of ownership on the reaction of banks to monetary policy, and also test whether the reaction of different types of banks to monetary policy changes is different in easy and tight policy regimes. Our results suggest that there are considerable differences in the reactions of different types of banks to monetary policy initiatives of the central bank, and that the bank lending channel of monetary policy is likely to be much more effective in a tight money period than in an easy money period. We also find differences in impact of monetary policy changes on less risky short-term and more risky medium-term lending. We discuss the policy implications of the findings.     

Interest Rates and Credit Risk

This paper explores the effects of shifts in interest rates on corporate leverage and default in the context of a dynamic model in which the link between leverage and default risk comes from the lower incentives of overindebted entrepreneurs to guarantee firm survival. The need to finance new investment pushes firms' leverage ratio above some state‐contingent target toward which firms gradually adjust through earnings retention. The response to interest rate rises and cuts is both asymmetric and heterogeneously distributed across firms. Our results help rationalize some of the evidence regarding the risk‐taking channel of monetary policy.     

Bank risk,competition and bank connectedness with firms: A literature review

The outbreak of the 2007–2009 financial crisis and of the European sovereign debt crisis again raised questions about the vulnerability and the behaviour of banking institutions. The unconventional monetary policies that followed have flattened the yield curve and created a low interest rates environment. This can give rise to risk-taking behaviour from banks and can therefore undermine the stability of the banking system with negative impact of the credit supply, corporate investment and real economy. This article proposes a literature review on the main determinants of bank lending and risk-taking decisions, going through the competition in the banking market, the bank connectedness with firms and the role of monetary and banking authorities. The systemic risk concept is also discussed as well as its drivers and potential measures that should be monitored by prudential authorities in order to preserve financial stability.