Abstract This paper investigates the role of banking supervision in controlling bank risk. Banking supervision is measured in terms of enforcement outputs (i.e., on-site audits and sanctions). Our results show an inverted U-shaped relationship between on-site audits and bank risk, while the relationship between sanctions and risk appears to be linear and negative. We also consider the combined effect of effective supervision and banking regulation (in the form of capital and market discipline requirements) on bank risk. We find that effective supervision and market discipline requirements are important and complementary mechanisms in reducing bank fragility. This is in contrast to capital requirements, which prove to be rather futile in controlling bank risk, even when supplemented with a higher volume of on-site audits and sanctions.

A recent line of research views the low interest-rate environment of the early to mid 2000s as an element that triggered increased risk-taking appetite of banks in search for yield. This paper uses approximately 18000 annual observations on euro area banks over the period 2001–2008 and presents strong empirical evidence that low-interest rates indeed increase bank risk-taking substantially. This result is robust across a number of different specifications that account, inter alia, for the potential endogeneity of interest rates and/or the dynamics of bank risk. Notably, among the banks of the large euro area countries this effect is less pronounced for French institutions, which held on average a relatively low level of risk assets. Finally, the distributional effects of interest rates on bank risk-taking due to individual bank characteristics reveal that the impact of interest rates on risk assets is diminished for banks with higher equity capital and is amplified for banks with higher off-balance sheet items.

Using global data on syndicated loans, we show that any negative effect of stronger creditor rights on loan spreads, as identified in the prior literature (Qian and Strahan, 2007; Bae and Goyal, 2009), disappears once we include a single country characteristic: country size. This finding is robust to several identification methods, both global samples and within-country changes in creditor rights, different panel spans, and hundreds of control variables. We identify that key origins of the effect of country size on loan pricing are ethnic fractionalization and within-country heterogeneity in economic preferences, which create country risk.

Standard banking theory suggests that there exists an optimal level of credit risk that yields maximum bank profit. We identify the optimal level of risk-weighted assets that maximizes banks’ returns in the full sample of US banks over the period 1996–2011. We find that this optimal level is cyclical for the average bank, being higher than the realized credit risk in relatively stable periods with high profit opportunities for banks but quickly decreasing below the realized in periods of turmoil. We place this cyclicality into the nexus between bank risk and monetary policy. We show that a contractionary monetary policy in stable periods, where the optimal credit risk is higher than the realized credit risk, increases the gap between them. An increase in this gap also comes as a result of an expansionary monetary policy in bad economic periods, where the realized risk is higher than the optimal risk.

A recent line of research highlights trust as an important element guiding the decision of households to invest into risky financial assets and insurance products. This paper contributes to this literature by identifying happiness as another key driver of the same decision. Using detailed survey data from a sample of Dutch households, we show that the impact of happiness on households’ financial decisions works in the opposite direction and is more economically important compared to trust. Specifically, happiness leads to a lower probability of investing into risky financial assets and having insurance, while trust has the usual positive effect found in the literature. Furthermore, the negative effect of happiness on the ownership of risky financial assets is about 6% higher compared to the positive equivalent of trust. Similarly, the negative effect of happiness on the ownership of insurance is 3% higher than the positive effect of trust.

A key policy to limit the possibility of bank runs is an explicit deposit insurance scheme, which can be either privately or government funded. Using syndicated loans from 63 countries during the period 1985–2016, we study the effect of government involvement in deposit insurance funding on price and non-price characteristics of loans. We show that changes from purely private-funded to either government-funded or jointly funded deposit insurance increase all-in-spread-drawn by approximately 4.6 %, further increase loan fees, decrease loan maturity, and increase the use of performance pricing provisions. Our findings are consistent with the moral hazard problem behind government-funded deposit insurance schemes.

The aim of this study is to provide a methodology for the joint estimation of efficiency and market power of individual banks. The proposed method utilizes the separate implications of the new empirical industrial organization and the stochastic frontier literatures and suggests identification using the local maximum likelihood (LML) technique. Through LML, estimation of market power of individual banks becomes feasible, while a number of restrictive theoretical and empirical assumptions are relaxed. The empirical analysis is carried out on the basis of EMU bank data. Market power estimates indicate fairly competitive conduct in general; however, heterogeneity in market power estimates is substantial across banks. The latter result suggests that the practice of some banks deviates from the average fairly competitive behavior, a finding that has important policy implications. Finally, efficiency and market power present a negative relationship, which is in line with the so-called "quiet life hypothesis". © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Abstract Does market power of banks affect firm performance? To answer this question we examine 25,236 syndicated loan facilities granted between 2000 and 2010 by 296 banks to 9,029 US non-financial firms. Accounting for both observed and unobserved bank and firm heterogeneity, we find that firms that were recently poorly performing obtain loans from banks with more market power. However, in the year after loan origination market power positively affects firm performance, but only if it is not too high. Our estimates thus suggest that bank market power can facilitate access to credit by poorly performing firms, yet at the same time also boosts the performance of the firms that obtain credit.

Abstract This article provides cross-country evidence that variations in bank regulatory policies result in differences in income distribution. In particular, the overall liberalization of banking systems decreases income inequality significantly. However, this effect becomes insignificant for countries with low levels of economic and institutional development and for market-based economies. Among liberalization policies, credit and interest rate controls have the most significant negative effect on inequality. Privatizations and liberalization of international capital flows also decrease income inequality; the latter also increases the income share of the relatively poor. In contrast, liberalization of securities markets increases income inequality substantially.

We assess the effect of formal enforcement actions against banks for safety and soundness reasons on punished banks’ deposits, and then examine whether this effect is caused by demand-side or supply-side forces. To this end, we use hand-collected data on enforcement actions, and bank-quarter data on deposits and other bank characteristics from 2000 through 2014. Our results show that total deposits at punished banks decrease by 8.5% in the post-enforcement year, with uninsured deposits declining by 14.5% and insured deposits falling by 7.4%. We also find that the deposit decline is predominantly caused by demand-side forces, that is, by punished banks’ decision to curtail the asset side of their balance sheet.