Knowledge that Transforms

We investigate the role of CEO power and government monitoring on bank dividend policy for a sample of 109 European listed banks for the period 2005–2013. We employ three main proxies for CEO power: CEO ownership, CEO tenure, and unforced CEO turnover. We show that CEO power has a negative impact on dividend payout ratios and on performance, suggesting that entrenched CEOs do not have the incentive to increase payout ratios to discourage monitoring from minority shareholders. Stronger internal monitoring by board of directors, as proxied by larger ownership stakes of the board members, increases performance but decreases payout ratios. These findings are contrary to those from the entrenchment literature for non-financial firms. Government ownership and the presence of a government official on the board of directors of the bank, also reduces payout ratios, in line with the view that government is incentivized to favor the interest of bank creditors before the interest of minority shareholders. These results show that government regulators are mainly concerned about bank safety and this allows powerful CEOs to distribute low payouts at the expense of minority shareholders.

This paper offers a possible explanation for the conflicting results in the literature concerning the empirical relation between collateral and loan risk. We posit that differences in collateral characteristics, such as liquidity, may be associated with the empirical dominance of different risk-collateral relations implied by economic theory. Using credit registry data and a novel identification strategy to control for borrower and lender selection effects allows us to differentiate between the ex ante and ex post theories of collateral. We find that collateral overall is associated with lower risk premiums and higher default rates. The results indicate an important role for collateral in mitigating losses and reducing risk-taking incentives, consistent with ex post theories. Liquid collateral is associated with especially low risk premiums, and these loans perform better than those with illiquid collateral or no collateral. We also find that individual collateral types exhibit significant variation in terms of risk-collateral relations, with some consistent with ex ante theories and others with ex post theories. Our results suggest that the conflicting results in the literature may occur because different samples may be dominated by different types of collateral with different economic characteristics.

Using data from the Italian Credit Register we identify the adverse effect of the freeze of the securitization market on bank lending during the crisis of 2007–2008. Applying a differences-in-differences estimation to data on firms that borrow from multiple banks, we single out credit supply by including firm fixed effects. Our results show that the degree to which banks tightened credit supply to nonfinancial firms is positively related to the share of loans they securitized before the crisis. The tightening translated into lower credit growth, higher interest rates, lower probability of accepting loan applications and higher probability of relationship termination. Firms were unable to fully compensate the negative credit supply shock, which suggests that the securitization freeze played a role in reducing aggregate credit availability.

Different modes of external finance provide heterogeneous benefits for the borrowing firms. Informal finance offers informational advantages whereas formal finance is scalable. Using unique survey data from China, we find that informal finance is associated with higher sales growth for small firms but lower sales growth for large firms. We identify a complementary effect between informal and formal finance for the sales growth of small firms, but not for large firms. Co-funding, thereby simultaneously using the informational advantage of informal finance and the scalability of formal finance, is therefore the optimal choice for small firms.

This paper shows that the liquidity risk associated with short-term debt financing can be used to sort insolvent firms out of financial markets when their solvency risk is private information. Notwithstanding this sorting role of short-term debt, unregulated financial firms tend to choose an inefficiently short debt maturity structure. This inefficiency arises for two reasons. First, by issuing more short-term debt, low-risk firms reduce their expected funding costs. This leads to a misalignment of private and social incentives as firms fail to fully internalize the social costs of becoming illiquid. Second, while the sorting role of short-term debt is reflected in a decline of long-term interest rates when more short-term debt is issued, creditors’ inability to observe firms’ solvency risk leads to an excessive reduction of long-term interest rates. This further distorts firms’ funding choice towards short-term debt.

Increased awareness of the importance of non-bank financial infrastructures has brought increased concern about the potential for bailouts and the resultant moral hazard problem. This paper examines the question with regard to derivatives central counterparties. We consider the layers of protection that derivatives central clearing parties (CCPs) have established in the absence of an expectation of regulatory rescue. We then provide a model of the tension between the desire for ex post rescue of a systemically important financial infrastructure and the desire to maintain ex ante discipline on the infrastructure. The model illustrates the factors that should lead to relaxation or tightening of the financial regulator's discretion for rescue. We consider examples of failures of derivatives CCPs in order to highlight the importance of these considerations.

Abstract This paper examines the relationship between banks’ capitalization strategies and their corporate governance and executive compensation schemes for an international sample of banks over the 2003–2011 period. Shareholder-friendly corporate governance, in the form of a separation of the CEO and chairman of the board roles, intermediate board size, and an absence of anti-takeover provisions, is associated with lower bank capitalization, consistent with shareholder incentives to shift risk towards the financial safety net. Higher values of executive option and stock wealth invested in the bank are associated with higher capitalization as a potential reflection of executive risk aversion, but the risk-taking incentives embedded in executive compensation packages are associated with lower capitalization.

Do government-sponsored bank recapitalization programs spur lending and reduce risk? This paper assesses the impact of Indonesia’s bank recapitalization program on lending and bank risk following the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Using unique bank-level data, difference-in-differences estimates suggest that recapitalization increased lending (and more so for larger banks), but also boosted bank risk in the long term. Results remain robust to considerations of (1) bank-level differences in political connections, business group affiliation, ownership type, and (2) changes in macroeconomic conditions, capital requirements, accounting regulations, and public credit registry availability.

We study the effects of regulatory interventions and capital support (bailouts) on banks’ liquidity creation. We rely on instrumental variables to deal with possible endogeneity concerns. Our key findings, which are based on a unique supervisory German dataset, are that regulatory interventions robustly trigger decreases in liquidity creation, while capital support does not affect liquidity creation. Additional results include the effects of these actions on different components of liquidity creation, lending, and risk taking. Our findings provide new and important insights into the debates about the design of regulatory interventions and bailouts.

Bank managers can buy risky assets through a regulated bank and through an off-balance sheet special purpose vehicle (SPV). The choice of the preferred entity depends on whether bank managers can lower the cost of SPV funding by guaranteeing SPV returns with bank proceeds. When there are no guarantees, using the SPV is more profitable for high levels of the minimum capital requirement, in which case the SPV crowds out the bank. Contrary, when bank managers guarantee SPV returns, the bank needs to operate for the SPV to take advantage of recourse to the bank’s balance sheet also when the capital requirement is high. The bank and the SPV intermediation become complements.