This paper develops time-varying repayment mortgage contract designs based on borrower income expectations and risk profiles over loan age. These contract designs differ between loans and are based on growing annuities. We benchmark these contracts to the traditional 30-year fixed-rate mortgage contracts. The proposed contract innovations reduce illiquidity but increase leverage due to payment delays. The combined effects reduce the probability of default, systematic risk, and regulatory capital. Due to the risk reduction, lenders can increase the gross return on regulatory capital by 10 percent, or alternatively, borrowers may benefit from credit spreads that are 17 basis points lower. Overall, our contracts enhance the resilience of mortgage markets. JEL: G01; G20; G21; C51, C55

This paper develops a framework to measure the exposure to systematic risk for pools of asset securitizations and measures empirically whether current ratings-based rules for regulatory capital of securitizations under Basel II and Basel III reflect this exposure. The analysis is based on a comprehensive US dataset on asset securitizations for the time period between 2000 and 2008. We find that the shortfall of regulatory capital during the Global Financial Crisis is strongly related to ratings. In particular, we empirically show that insufficient capital is allocated to tranches with the highest rating. These tranches account for the greatest part of the total issuance volumes. Furthermore, this paper is the first to calibrate risk weights which account for systematic risk and provide sufficient capital buffers to cover the exposure during similar economic downturns. These policy-relevant findings suggest a re-calibration of RBA risk weights and may contribute to the current efforts by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and others to re-establish sustainable securitization markets and to improve the stability of the financial system.

Using U.S. bank holding company data, we study the impact of the crisis liquidity programs initiated by the U.S. Federal Reserve on bank-specific information production. We find empirical evidence that following the receipt of liquidity support there was a pervasive decrease in bank stock price informativeness that increased market synchronicity and crash risk. Our findings further suggest that these effects are mainly driven by bank participation in the Discount Window (DW) and Term Auction Facility (TAF) programs. On the bright side, we confirm that the liquidity programs served their purpose in targeting and supporting illiquid banks with low core stable funding sources through the crisis.

There is a current controversy concerning the appropriate size of banks’ capital requirements, and the trade-off between the costs and benefits of implementing higher capital requirements. We quantify the size of capital buffers required to reduce system-wide losses using confidential regulatory data for Australian banks from 2002 to 2014 and annual public accounts from 1978 to 2014. We find that a moderate increase in bank capital buffers is sufficient to maintain financial system resilience, even after taking economic downturns into consideration. Furthermore, while banks benefit from paying a lower cost of debt when they have a higher capital buffer, lending volumes are lower indicating that credit supply may be hampered if bank capital levels are too high within a financial system.

This paper analyzes the capital incentives and adequacy of financial institutions for asset portfolio securitizations. The empirical analysis is based on US securitization rating and impairment data. The paper finds that regulatory capital rules for securitizations may be insufficient to cover implied losses during economic downturns such as the Global Financial Crisis. In addition, the rating process of securitizations provides capital arbitrage incentives for financial institutions and may further reduce regulatory capital requirements. These policy-relevant findings assume that the ratings assigned by rating agencies are correct and can be used to build a test for the ability of Basel capital regulations to cover downturn losses.

This study analyses the level of systematic risk for US mortgage portfolio securitisations based on the variation of default rates which cannot be explained by observed deterministic factors. Systematic risk is decomposed into general systemic risk, rating-class-specific systematic risk and their covariance structure. General systematic risk sensitivities increase from lower rating classes to medium rating classes and decreases to higher rating classes. Rating-class-specific systematic risk shows an opposite pattern. The methodology provides for more accurate probability of default and Value-at-Risk forecasts.

This paper shows that the revised loan loss provisioning based on the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and the US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) implies a reduction of Tier 1 capital. The paper finds in a counterfactual analysis that these changes are more severe (i) during economic downturns, (ii) for credit portfolios of low quality, (iii) for banks that do not tighten capital standards during downturns, and (iv) under a more comprehensive definition of significant increase in credit risk (SICR) under IFRS. The provisioning rules further increase the procyclicality of bank capital requirements. Adjustments of the SICR threshold or capital buffers are suggested as ways to mitigate a regulatory pressure that may emerges due to the reduction of regulatory capital.

This study examines the relationship between funding liquidity and bank risk taking. Using quarterly data for U.S. bank holding companies from 1986 to 2014, we find evidence that banks having lower funding liquidity risk as proxied by higher deposit ratios, take more risk. A reduction in banks’ funding liquidity risk increases bank risk as evidenced by higher risk-weighted assets, greater liquidity creation and lower Z-scores. However, our results show that bank size and capital buffers usually limit banks from taking more risk when they have lower funding liquidity risk. Moreover, during the Global Financial Crisis banks with lower funding liquidity risk took less risk. The findings of this study have implications for bank regulators advocating greater liquidity and capital requirements for banks under Basel III.