Knowledge that Transforms

An important element of the macro-prudential analysis is the study of the link between business cycle fluctuations and banking sector profitability and how this link is affected by institutional and structural characteristics. This work estimates a set of equations for net interest income, non-interest income, operating costs, provisions, and profit before taxes, for banks in the main industrialized countries and evaluates the effects on banking profitability of shocks to both macroeconomic and financial factors. Distinguishing mainly the euro area from Anglo-Saxon countries, the analysis also identifies differences in the resilience of the respective banking systems and relates them to the characteristics of their financial structure.

There is a considerable amount of research that seeks to determine the extent to which retail market participants exert market discipline on banks either through the price approach (the correlation of price to risk), or the quantity approach (the movement of funds in response to changes in risk). In this paper we propose and implement a third approach: the retail market conditions approach. We seek to determine if the prerequisites for the exertion of effective market discipline by stakeholder monitors, as set out in Llewellyn and Mayes (2003. The role of market discipline in handling problem banks. Bank of Finland Discussion Papers. extlesshttp://www.bof.fi/eng/7_tutkimus/index.stm extgreater (retrieved 13.04.04)), prevail by directly examining conditions that prevail among retail market participants. We find little evidence to support the proposition that they are being met among New Zealand retail depositors.

An increasing number of countries show a trend towards a certain degree of consolidation of powers in financial supervision, which has resulted in the establishment of unified regulators, that are different from the national central banks. By contrast a high involvement of the central bank in supervision seems to be correlated with a multi-authorities regime (central bank fragmentation effect). This paper, using a simple application of a general common agency game, sheds light on which conditions the politicians prefer when implementing an unified sector supervision outside the central bank. From a theoretical point of view the quality of public sector governance plays a crucial role in determining the supervision unification. Focusing on the behaviour of the “good” policymaker (helping hand type), it will prefer a unified financial authority that is different from the central bank if the correspondent welfare gains-linked to at least one of the three effects: moral hazard, conflict of interest, bureaucracy—are considered higher respect to the information losses. The “bad” policymaker (grabbing hand type) will choose the single financial authority if the financial industry likes it, and the central bank is not a captured one. On the other hand, the paper tests the model, confirming the robustness of the institutional position of the central bank in explaining the recent trend in supervision consolidation, with an empirical analysis performed with ordered functions on an updated dataset.

It has been argued that central bank independence (CBI) may not only be beneficial for reaching the objective of price stability, but also for maintaining financial stability. Greater independence from external pressure implies that central banks are less politically constrained in acting to prevent financial distress, while it also will allow them to act earlier and more decisively when a crisis erupts. We estimate the relation between CBI and a newly constructed measure of financial instability using a dynamic panel model for the period 1985–2005 with a large set of control variables. We find a significant and robust negative relation between CBI and financial instability, which is mostly due to political independence.

What is the impact of financial sector segments at different stages of development? We apply a production function approach to investigate the impact of the credit, bond and stock segments in nine EU-accession countries over early years of transition (1996–2000) and compare these to mature market economies and to countries at intermediate stage. We find that the transfer mechanisms differ over the development cycle (from bond markets to educational attainment to labor participation) and that financial market segments with links to the public sector (but not stock markets) contributed to stability and growth in transition economies.

Financial innovation and greater information availability have increased the tradability of bank assets and have reduced banks’ dependence on individual bank managers. We show that this can have two opposing consequences for banking stability. First, the hold-up problem between bank managers and shareholders becomes less severe. Consequently, banks’ capital structure needs to be less concerned with disciplining the management. Deposits – the most effective disciplining device – can be reduced, increasing banks’ resilience to adverse return shocks. However, limiting the hold-up problem also diminishes bank managers’ rents, reducing their incentives to properly monitor and screen borrowers, with adverse implications for asset quality. Thus, the default risk of banks does not necessarily decline. We argue that this delivers a novel explanation for the origin of the recent subprime crisis.

We estimate the impact of macroeconomic news on composite stock returns in three emerging European Union financial markets (the Budapest BUX, Prague PX-50, and Warsaw WIG-20), using intraday data and macroeconomic announcements. Our contribution is twofold. We employ a larger set of macroeconomic data releases than used in previous studies and also use intraday data, an excess impact approach, and foreign news to provide more reliable inferences. Composite stock returns are computed based on 5-min intervals (ticks) and macroeconomic news are measured based on the deviations of the actual announcement values from their expectations. Overall, we find that all three new EU stock markets are subject to significant spillovers directly via the composite index returns from the EU, the U.S. and neighboring markets; Budapest exhibits the strongest spillover effect, followed by Warsaw and Prague. The Czech and Hungarian markets are also subject to spillovers indirectly through the transmission of macroeconomic news. The impact of EU-wide announcements is evidenced more in the case of Hungary, while the Czech market is more impacted by U.S. news. The Polish market is marginally affected by EU news. In addition, after decomposing pooled announcements, we show that the impact of multiple announcements is stronger than that of single news. Our results suggest that the impact of foreign macroeconomic announcements goes beyond the impact of the foreign stock markets on Central and Eastern European indices. We also discuss the implications of the findings for financial stability in the three emerging European markets.

We examine the effects of structural change in the U.S. banking industry, as well as key regulatory changes, including recently enacted deposit insurance reform legislation, on the resiliency of the FDIC-administered bank insurance fund (BIF) by estimating and comparing the probability of BIF insolvency over time. We do this using a Markov-switching model that relies on historical patterns of BIF disbursements to define the probability of switching among three “states” of the banking industry's financial health. Monte Carlo simulations are then performed to project the financial condition of the BIF over a 50-year period. Our results indicate that the insolvency risk to the bank insurance fund has increased significantly due to industry consolidation, and is mainly due to the concentration of deposits in the 10 largest U.S. banking companies. We also find that recent deposit insurance reforms will cause only a marginal reduction in the risk of BIF insolvency. The increased risk associated with a more concentrated industry structure simply dominates the reform effect.

The paper investigates the nexus between labor and financial markets, focusing on how labor union’s attitude in the wage-setting process and the firm’s investment strategy affect asset returns. We assume that the labor union’s relative preferences between wage and employment depend on selected measures of firm’s financial performance. The paper shows that if the labor union ties its preference for wage to the firm’s dividends (or to any other quantity measuring available liquidity), then the volatility of the firm’s returns increases. Consequently, equities have to grant high expected returns in order to remunerate the increased volatility. This mechanism offers an explanation for the “equity premium” (that is the difference between the equity return rate and the risk free rate). It is a welcome result that the simulated excess return is about the empirical estimate and that it is obtained with a plausibly low parameterization of the shareholders’ risk aversion.