Over the period 1980–2012, large U.S. commercial banks raise and retain less equity during credit expansions, which amplifies their leverage. The decrease in equity issuance is large relative to subsequent banking losses. I consider a variety of explanations for why banks resist raising equity and find evidence consistent with the diminishment of creditor market discipline due to government guarantees. I test this explanation by analyzing the removal of government guarantees to German Landesbank creditors and find that creditor market discipline and equity issuance increase. These findings help explain why banks resist raising equity, making financial distress more likely. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

We test a bank credit channel through which unexpected increases in inflation lead to short-run macroeconomic fluctuations. For identification, we study an unexpected U.S. inflation increase in early 1977 and exploit differences in state-level reserve requirements for Federal Reserve nonmember banks, which create differences in banks’ inflation exposures. More exposed banks reduce lending, lowering local house prices and construction employment. We provide evidence for potential mechanisms, including a bank net wealth and a loan misallocation channel. Our results suggest that an important consequence of inflation is its impairment of the banking sector.

We study removals of “credit ceilings,” quantitative limits on bank credit supply imposed by many countries until the 1980s. Exploiting differences in loan types affected, we find that these removals predict increases in bank credit, residential investment, house prices, and bank stock prices, followed by reversals, recessions, and banking crises. These effects are separate from those of other financial deregulations. Overall, our results suggest that credit supply shocks do not simply amplify existing fragilities but can initiate economic boom-and-bust cycles on their own.

We study data on commercial banks and securities firms across multiple countries since 1870. Balance sheet expansion of leveraged intermediaries negatively predicts returns of stocks, bonds, currencies, and housing. The predictability is stronger at shorter horizons, is robust to macroeconomic controls, and holds outside distress periods, in contrast to models featuring nonlinearities during distress. Intermediaries in global financial centers predict international equity returns. A new data set on individual stock holdings of Japanese intermediaries since 1955 shows intermediaries affect returns of stocks directly held. Our results suggest a strong universal link between intermediaries and asset returns distinct from macroeconomic channels.

By analyzing 20 developed economies over 1920–2012, we find the following evidence of overoptimism and neglect of crash risk by bank equity investors during credit expansions: (i) bank credit expansion predicts increased bank equity crash risk, but despite the elevated crash risk, also predicts lower mean bank equity returns in subsequent one to three years; (ii) conditional on bank credit expansion of a country exceeding a 95th percentile threshold, the predicted excess return for the bank equity index in subsequent three years is −37.3%; and (iii) bank credit expansion is distinct from equity market sentiment captured by dividend yield and yet dividend yield and credit expansion interact with each other to make credit expansion a particularly strong predictor of lower bank equity returns when dividend yield is low.

We examine historical banking crises through the lens of bank equity declines, which cover a broad sample of episodes of banking distress with and without banking panics. To do this, we construct a new data set on bank equity returns and narrative information on banking panics for 46 countries over the period of 1870 to 2016. We find that even in the absence of panics, large bank equity declines are associated with substantial credit contractions and output gaps. Although panics are an important amplification mechanism, our results indicate that panics are not necessary for banking crises to have severe economic consequences. Furthermore, panics tend to be preceded by large bank equity declines, suggesting that panics are the result, rather than the cause, of earlier bank losses. We use bank equity returns to uncover a number of forgotten historical banking crises and create a banking crisis chronology that distinguishes between bank equity losses and panics.

We study performance and competition among firms engaging in high-frequency trading (HFT). We construct measures of latency and find that differences in relative latency account for large differences in HFT firms’ trading performance. HFT firms that improve their latency rank due to colocation upgrades see improved trading performance. The stronger performance associated with speed comes through both the short-lived information channel and the risk management channel, and speed is useful for various strategies, including market making and cross-market arbitrage. We find empirical support for many predictions regarding relative latency competition.

Abstract We study the mechanisms driving bank losses across historical banking crises in 46 economies and the effectiveness of policy interventions in restoring bank capitalization. We find that bank stocks experience large, permanent declines at the onset of crises. These losses predict commensurate long-term declines in banks’ earnings and dividends, rather than elevated future equity returns. Bank losses are primarily driven by write-downs of nonperforming assets, not asset sales during panics. Forceful liquidity-based interventions during crises predict only small, temporary increases in bank market value. Overall, these results suggest that bank losses during crises are not primarily due to temporary price dislocations. Early liquidity interventions can avert banking crises, but only under specific conditions. Once large bank equity declines have occurred, policy responses have historically failed to prevent persistent undercapitalization in the banking sector.