Information disclosure and liquidity crisis

We analyze a model in which a firm’s manager privately learns about the expected return on the firm’s project and strategically discloses it to investors (i.e., discretionary disclosure). Based on the manager’s disclosure, investors decide whether to withdraw their investments from the firm. Our analysis indicates that investors’ optimistic prior beliefs in the firm reduce the possibility of their withdrawals and the manager’s incentive of discretionary disclosure, whereas pessimistic beliefs increase them. We further examine the effects of a commitment to reporting of bad news, namely, the conservative disclosure rule. This rule always suppresses the manager’s incentive of discretionary disclosure; however, it increases (reduces) investors’ withdrawals when they are optimistic (pessimistic) about the firm’s project.     

Corporate bond liquidity before and after the onset of the subprime crisis

We analyze liquidity components of corporate bond spreads during 2005-2009 using a new robust illiquidity measure. The spread contribution from illiquidity increases dramatically with the onset of the subprime crisis. The increase is slow and persistent for investment grade bonds while the effect is stronger but more short-lived for speculative grade bonds. Bonds become less liquid when financial distress hits a lead underwriter and the liquidity of bonds issued by financial firms dries up under crises. During the subprime crisis, flight-to-quality is confined to AAA-rated bonds.     

Finance companies in Mexico: Unexpected victims of the global liquidity crunch

We study the connection between the global liquidity crisis and the severe credit crunch experienced by finance companies (SOFOLES) in Mexico using firm-level data between 2001 and 2011. Our results provide supporting evidence that, as a result of the liquidity shock, SOFOLES faced severely restricted access to their main funding sources (commercial bank loans, loans from other organizations, and public debt markets). After controlling for the potential endogeneity of their funding, we find that the liquidity shock explains 64 percent of SOFOLES’ credit contraction during the recent financial crisis (2008–2009). We use our estimates to disentangle supply from demand factors as determinants of the credit contraction. After controlling for the large decline in loan demand during the financial crisis, our findings suggest that supply factors (such as nonperforming loans and lower liquidity buffers) also played a significant role. Finally, we find that financial deregulation implemented in 2006 may have amplified the effects of the global liquidity shock.     

Reprint of: Market liquidity in the financial crisis: The role of liquidity commonality and flight-to-quality

We examine the dynamics and the drivers of market liquidity during the financial crisis, using a unique volume-weighted spread measure. According to the literature we find that market liquidity is impaired when stock markets decline, implying a positive relation between market and liquidity risk. Moreover, this relationship is the stronger the deeper one digs into the order book. Even more interestingly, this paper sheds further light on so far puzzling features of market liquidity: liquidity commonality and flight-to-quality. We show that liquidity commonality varies over time, increases during market downturns, peaks at major crisis events and becomes weaker the deeper we look into the limit order book. Consistent with recent theoretical models that argue for a spiral effect between the financial sector’s funding liquidity and an asset’s market liquidity, we find that funding liquidity tightness induces an increase in liquidity commonality which then leads to market-wide liquidity dry-ups. Therefore our findings corroborate the view that market liquidity can be a driving force for financial contagion. Finally, we show that there is a positive relationship between credit risk and liquidity risk, i.e., there is a spread between liquidity costs of high and low credit quality stocks, and that in times of increased market uncertainty the impact of credit risk on liquidity risk intensifies. This corroborates the existence of a flight-to-quality or flight-to-liquidity phenomenon also on the stock markets.     

Liquidity risk and stock performance during the financial crisis

We investigate whether and how ex-ante liquidity risk affects realized stock returns during the global financial crisis of 2008–2009 in international equity markets. We find that stocks with higher pre-crisis return exposure to global market liquidity shocks experience larger price reductions during the crisis period. Our findings provide further insight into the comprehensive picture of the effect of liquidity risk on asset prices, especially in an international context and under different market conditions.     

Financial intermediation and the supply of liquidity

I study the role of financial intermediaries in supplying liquidity to the real economy. Firms hold liquid assets to meet unanticipated expenses. Financial intermediaries supply liquidity by pooling partially liquid assets, but their ability to commit future funds depends on their capital. When liquidity is scarce, there is a positive liquidity premium and investment is inefficiently low. Bank losses raise the liquidity premium and reduce investment. I analyze the optimal supply of public liquidity and find that when private liquidity is scarce the government should issue bonds for their liquidity properties, providing justification for countercyclical budget deficits.     

嵌入投资银行后的银行危机传导模型

基于Sujit模型,通过在支付清算系统内构建嵌入投资银行的危机传导模型,同时考虑中央银行的两种政策对防范少数银行危机蔓延至系统危机的作用,结果发现,少数银行引发系统危机的主要原因在于危机银行影响了与其有着支付清算关系的债权银行的收益和它们的预期信心,中央银行政策对控制危机传导是有效的.     

Asymmetric transmission of a bank liquidity shock

We investigate whether banks that receive a positive liquidity shock make up for the reduction in the amount of credit supplied by banks that suffer a negative liquidity shock. For identification, we use the exogenous shock to the Brazilian banking system caused by the international turmoil of 2008 that sparked a run on small and medium banks toward systemically important banks. We find that a reduction in liquidity causes banks to strongly decrease their loan supply, whereas a positive liquidity shock has a small (if any) effect on the loan supply. Our evidence shows that this asymmetric effect of liquidity on the loan supply occurs both at the intensive and the extensive margins. Our findings are consistent with the theories that predict that borrowers face switching costs and that banks tend to hold on to liquidity during periods of systemic uncertainty.     

Contagion and banking crisis – International evidence for 2007–2009

Policy makers aim to avoid banking crises, and although they can to some extent control domestic conditions, internationally transmitted crises are difficult to tackle. This paper identifies international contagion in banking during the 2007–2009 crisis for 54 economies. We identify three channels of contagion – systematic, idiosyncratic and volatility – and find evidence for these in 45 countries. Banking crises are overwhelmingly associated with the presence of both systematic and idiosyncratic contagion. The results reveal that crisis shocks transmitted from a foreign jurisdiction via idiosyncratic contagion increase the likelihood of a systemic crisis in the domestic banking system by almost 37 percent, whereas increased exposure via systematic contagion does not necessarily destabilize the domestic banking system. Thus while policy makers and regulatory authorities are rightly concerned with the systematic transmission of banking crises, reducing the potential for idiosyncratic contagion can importantly reduce the consequences for the domestic economy.     

Market-specific and currency-specific risk during the global financial crisis: Evidence from the interbank markets in Tokyo and London

This paper investigates how international money markets reflected credit and liquidity risk during the global financial crisis. After matching the currency denomination, we examine how the Tokyo Interbank Offered Rate (TIBOR) was synchronized with the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). We find remarkably asymmetric responses in market-specific and currency-specific risk during the crisis. The regression results suggest that market-specific credit risk increased the difference across markets, whereas liquidity risk caused the difference across currency denominations. They also support the view that liquidity shortage of the US dollar occurred in international money markets during the crisis. Coordinated central bank liquidity provisions were useful in reducing the liquidity shortage of the US dollar, but their effectiveness was asymmetric across markets.     

The dark and the bright side of liquidity risks: Evidence from open-end real estate funds in Germany

During the 6-month period from December 2005 to June 2006, the German Real Estate mutual fund industry suffered an unprecedented liquidity crisis. We investigate to what extend competing theories of liquidity crises help explain this event. Our results show that fundamental factors not only mattered for the liquidity outflow in normal times but also during the crisis. However, strategic complementarities accelerated the withdrawals during the crisis suggesting that pure panic behavior contributed substantially to the massive outflows. Thus higher liquidity buffers might help mitigating these tail events. Furthermore, we find that funds with a lower fraction of shares held by institutional investors suffered from less significant outflows suggesting that a segmentation of funds for different investor groups might help mitigate panics.     

信息传递效率、货币传染与东亚汇率波动溢出分析

本文运用Cheung和Ng交叉相关系数方法,对东亚六国货币①——人民币、日元、韩元、泰国铢、新加坡元和林吉特的名义美元汇率波动溢出进行检验,发现东亚汇率波动溢出普遍存在且具有不对称性和多层次溢出特征。实证结果还表明,日元交易商能更加有效处理来自人民币、韩元、泰铢、新加坡元和林吉特五种货币的信息,而人民币交易商对处理来自日元、泰铢、新加坡元等货币的信息效率不高。     

Alternatives to blanket guarantees for containing a systemic crisis

This paper seeks to explain how policy actions undertaken at the outset of recent crises—particularly the issuance of extensive liquidity support and government guarantees—absorb off-budget fiscal resources and inappropriately constrain officials’ subsequent options for restructuring their country’s troubled financial and corporate sectors. Empirical evidence supports the commonsense view that the damage a crisis works on a country’s financial sector and on its real economy is lessened by taking market-mimicking actions that promptly estimate and allocate losses during the early stages of a crisis. The most important steps are to plan to call a timeout to separate hopelessly insolvent institutions from potentially viable ones and to provide haircuts, guarantees, and liquidity support in ways that protect taxpayers and avoid subsidizing insolvent institutions’ longshot gambles for resurrection.     

风险传染的信息识别——基于网络借贷市场的实证

基于清华大学金融科技研究院互联网金融研究中心网络借贷平台数据库与网贷之家相关平台统计数据,通过构建Logit模型与Cox比例风险回归模型来研究2015年12月e租宝事件和2018年6月备案延期后的“爆雷”现象,本文着重考察投资者是否具备根据信息披露程度识别问题平台和正常平台的能力。本文发现,第一,信息披露程度是影响平台风险的重要因素:信息披露程度越高的平台,其运营时间越长,出现问题的可能性越低。第二,信息披露程度越高的平台对抗风险的能力越强。风险传染期内,信息披露程度较高的平台,其成交量受市场负面情绪的影响较小。上述两点表明,总体而言,投资者重视平台披露的信息,并具备一定的信息识别能力。最后本研究也发现,上述两次风险事件期出现的问题平台是市场出清所需,它们和正常运营平台存在较大差异,尚无证据表明大量正常平台被拖累成问题平台。     

Market efficiency, the Mexican peso crisis, and the US bank stock returns: An application of the event parameter method

This paper examines the impact of the 1994 Mexican peso crisis on US bank returns using an event parameter approach. The event parameter approach explicitly predicts the stochastic return generating process on the occurrence or nonoccurrence of specific events. The event parameter method assumes that only the intercept term may vary between the estimation and analysis periods. Specifically, this study will examine two pairs of hypotheses, new information vs. information leakage and rational pricing vs. investor contagion, in the context of the 1994 Mexican peso and banking crisis. The empirical results support the new information hypothesis, which states that US stock prices reacted quickly to events related to the Mexican peso crisis. This research has also found evidence for bank contagion, although these did not spill over to other banks. The US government and international agencies acted promptly to contain the effect of the Mexican peso and banking crisis spreading to the US and to other Latin American countries.     

Illiquidity or credit deterioration: A study of liquidity in the US corporate bond market during financial crises

We investigate whether liquidity is an important price factor in the US corporate bond market. In particular, we focus on whether liquidity effects are more pronounced in periods of financial crises, especially for bonds with high credit risk, using a unique data set covering more than 20,000 bonds, between October 2004 and December 2008. We employ a wide range of liquidity measures and find that liquidity effects account for approximately 14% of the explained market-wide corporate yield spread changes. We conclude that the economic impact of the liquidity measures is significantly larger in periods of crisis, and for speculative grade bonds.     

The real effects of financial constraints: Evidence from a financial crisis

We survey 1,050 Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) in the U.S., Europe, and Asia to directly assess whether their firms are credit constrained during the global financial crisis of 2008. We study whether corporate spending plans differ conditional on this survey-based measure of financial constraint. Our evidence indicates that constrained firms planned deeper cuts in tech spending, employment, and capital spending. Constrained firms also burned through more cash, drew more heavily on lines of credit for fear banks would restrict access in the future, and sold more assets to fund their operations. We also find that the inability to borrow externally caused many firms to bypass attractive investment opportunities, with 86% of constrained U.S. CFOs saying their investment in attractive projects was restricted during the credit crisis of 2008. More than half of the respondents said they canceled or postponed their planned investments. Our results also hold in Europe and Asia, and in many cases are stronger in those economies. Our analysis adds to the portfolio of approaches and knowledge about the impact of credit constraints on real firm behavior.     

A tale of two time zones: The impact of substitutes on cross-listed stock liquidity

This article examines how the market quality of European cross-listed stocks is affected by the partial-day availability of close substitutes, i.e., shares of the same companies that are traded in their home markets but are not fully fungible with the cross-listed shares. Our findings suggest that narrower spreads and more competitive liquidity provision during overlapping trading hours reflect a significant impact from the availability of more substitutes in addition to the enhanced information environment and liquidity externalities when home markets are open. Our results also provide a richer picture of specialists’ intraday activities and offer new evidence of market integration.     

Bank-to-bank lending channel and the transmission of bank liquidity shocks: Evidence from France

Good liquidity is essential for the banking system to function properly and supply credit to the real sector. However, several banks all over the world face large shocks to their liquidity supply due to numerous factors. This study contributes to the literature on the transmission of liquidity shocks by investigating the bank-to-bank lending behavior of French banks during the global financial crisis (2008 and 2009). In addition, we examine the factors strongly influencing the liquidity of the interbank deposits market. First, using a fixed-effects model on a sample of 85 French banks for the period from 2005 to 2010, we find that the deposits channel plays an important role in the transmission of liquidity shocks across the banking system. Second, we use difference-in-difference methodology to study the effects of liquidity shock on bank lending. Our results show that French banks reduced their bank-to-bank lending significantly during the financial crisis period. Moreover, our results suggest that the reduction could have been due to deposit activities.     

Unveiling investor-induced channels of financial contagion in the 2008 financial crisis using copulas

Understanding how financial crises spread is important for policy-makers and regulators in order to take adequate measures to prevent or contain the spread of these crises. This paper will test whether there was contagion of the subprime financial crisis to the European stock markets of the NYSE Euronext group (Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Portugal) and, if evidence of contagion is found, it will determine the investor-induced channels through which the crisis propagated. We will use copula models for this purpose. After assessing whether there is evidence of financial contagion in the stock markets, we will examine whether the ‘wealth constraints’ transmission mechanism prevails over the ‘portfolio rebalancing’ channel. An additional test looks at the interaction between stock and bond markets during the crisis and allows us to determine if the transmission occurred due to the ‘cross market rebalancing’ channel or the ‘flying to quality’ phenomenon. The tests suggest that (i) financial contagion is present in all analyzed stock markets, (ii) a ‘portfolio rebalancing’ channel is the most important crisis transmission mechanism, (iii) and the ‘flight-to-quality’ phenomenon is also present in all analyzed stock markets.