Knowledge that Transforms

We present a quantitative model of deposit insurance to characterize the optimal levels of coverage for depositors and premiums raised from banks. Premiums contribute to a deposit insurance fund that lowers taxpayers’ resolution cost of bank failures. The key model tension is the policymaker’s dynamic tradeoff between building a fund to discourage moral hazard and insulate taxpayers from large fiscal shortfalls, and allowing banks to productively invest their deposits. We find that risk-adjusted premiums reduce moral hazard, enabling the policymaker to increase the share of covered deposits to total deposits by 12.5 percentage points and decrease the share of expected annual bank failures from 0.74% to 0.60%. The model predicts a fund-to-covered-deposits ratio that matches the data and declines in taxpayers’ income due to taxpayers’ risk aversion.

We study the effects of both tighter and looser bank capital requirements on bank risk-taking. We exploit credit register data matched with firm and bank level data in conjunction with changes in capital requirements stemming from Basel III, including the introduction of a SME supporting bank capital factor in the European Union. We find that tighter capital requirements reduce the supply of bank credit to firms, while looser capital requirements mitigate the credit supply effects of increasing capital. Importantly, at the loan level (credit supply), banks more affected by capital requirements change less the supply of credit to riskier than to safer firms, and these asymmetric effects occur for both the tightening and the loosening of bank capital requirements. Finally, these effects are also important at the firm-level for total credit availability and for firm survival. Interestingly, our results suggest that those banks most impacted by the tighter Basel III capital requirements prioritize credit among ex-ante riskier firms to avoid their closure, consistent with loan evergreening.

Relying on theories in which bank create private money by making loans that create deposits—a process we call “funding liquidity creation”—we measure how much funding liquidity the U.S. banking system creates. Private money creation by banks enables lending to not be constrained by the supply of cash deposits. During the 2001–2020 period, 92 percent of bank deposits were due to funding liquidity creation, and during 2011–2020 funding liquidity creation averaged $10.7 trillion per year, or 57 percent of GDP. Using natural disasters data, we provide causal evidence that better-capitalized banks create more funding liquidity and lend more even during times when cash deposit balances are falling or unchanged. Large banks as well as the top banks in Federal Reserve districts create more liquidity.

In this paper, we investigate price exuberance episodes in the main UK commercial real estate sectors – retail, offices and industrials - over the period December 1986–April 2022. Using the Backward Supremum Augmented Dickey Fuller approach of Phillips et al. (2015a,b), we find that episodes of price explosiveness are asynchronous across sectors with only common phase being the period 2003–2007. We also conduct a multivariate probit analysis to identify factors that indicate the occurrence of price exuberance episodes and generate early signals for possible price bubble building. The predictors for price explosiveness differ by sector with more consistent signals obtained from the yield curve for retail and industrials, rent growth for offices and industrials, and inflation for retail and offices. A key implication of this study is that the study of price exuberance and bubbles in private real estate should be sector specific even within the same country.

Most of the foreign exchange intervention literature overlooks the influence of market uncertainty when evaluating effectiveness. In this paper we take a fresh new look at how this uncertainty amplifies exchange rate effects. Our contribution is twofold. We first posit a partial equilibrium model with frictions to illustrate that when uncertainty is low, intervention is less effective, for agents are willing to bet against the central bank. Conversely, when uncertainty is high, intervention faces a weaker countervailing force from speculators and arbitragers. Second, we empirically test for the incremental effects of flimsy exchange rate fundamentals by using a sharp policy discontinuity in the way the Central Bank of Colombia intervened in the FX market. Our results indicate that market uncertainty increases depreciation of domestic currency in approximately 2 percentage points (pp) following central bank purchases of foreign currency and extends its duration in up to 4 weeks. Additionally, these purchases have an incremental effect in curbing exchange rate volatility in close to 5 pp.

Strategic alliances are voluntary corporate arrangements for mutual benefit. Although alliances are common as an alternative to M&As, they require cooperation between alliance partners who continue to operate as independent companies. Thus, relational risk—the probability and consequences of unsatisfactory cooperation or opportunistic behavior—is inherent in alliances and a major determinant of alliance success. In this paper, we examine and find that alliance announcement CARs are higher for companies sharing the same auditor with their alliance partner. Further, our findings suggest that the shared auditor effect is stronger for alliances where potential relational risk between alliance partners is greater. Our findings hold when we use “withdrawn” (i.e., the withdrawal of an announced alliance before its start date) as an alternative, albeit inverse, measure of alliance success. Collectively, we provide novel evidence which suggests that auditors add shareholder value by playing a matchmaking role in alliance formation, building inter-company trust and mitigating relational risk by facilitating the sharing of non-financial information between potential alliance partners among their audit clients.

We develop a dynamic framework to study banks’ incentives to take excessive risk in an emerging economy, where bank default probability and excess bank risk-taking are modeled endogenously. We calibrate it for the 1998 Peruvian economy. We find that the infinite-period feature amplifies banks’ incentives to take excessive risk. When we simulate the sudden stop that hit Peru in 1998, the model accurately predicts the substantial short-term rise in the non-performing loans ratio through the rise of the bank default probability.

We analyze how capital requirements from environmental risk exposure affect bank lending to the corporate sector, and how these effects transmit to real economic activity and to greenhouse gas emissions. To do so, we exploit the introduction of a policy in Brazil that required banks to incorporate environmental risks in their capital assessments. Using comprehensive credit data, we find that the policy induces large banks to reallocate their lending away from exposed sectors. The credit contraction has no substantial impact on the real activity and greenhouse gas emissions of these sectors, as smaller banks expand their lending afterwards. However, the policy triggers a moderate labor reallocation from small firms (i.e., those with higher costs of switching lenders) and into large firms within environmentally exposed sectors.

In this paper we present a methodology of model-based calibration of additional capital needed in an interconnected financial system to minimize potential contagion losses. Building on ideas from combinatorial optimization tailored to controlling contagion in case of complete information about an interbank network, we augment the model with three plausible types of fire sale mechanisms. We then demonstrate the power of the methodology on the euro area banking system based on a network of 373 banks. On the basis of an exogenous shock leading to defaults of some banks in the network, we find that the contagion losses and the policy authority’s ability to control them depend on the assumed fire sale mechanism and the fiscal budget constraint that may or may not restrain the policy authorities from infusing money to halt the contagion. The modelling framework could be used both as a crisis management tool to help inform decisions on capital/liquidity infusions in the context of resolutions and precautionary recapitalizations or as a crisis prevention tool to help calibrate capital buffer requirements to address systemic risks due to interconnectedness.

We study the impact of higher capital buffers on bank lending and risk-taking behaviour, at different time horizons following the initial policy decision. Employing a regression discontinuity design and confidential centralised supervisory data for euro area banks from 2014 to 2017, our research uniquely explores the effects of the EU policy on other systemically important institutions (O-SIIs) through a quasi-randomised experiment, exploiting the induced policy change and discontinuity of the O-SII identification process. Our findings show that the introduction of the O-SII buffers resulted in a short-term reduction in credit supply to households and financial sector, followed by a medium-term shift towards less risky borrowers, particularly in the household sector. We find a temporary cut in loan growth post-capital hikes, succeeded by a rebound in the medium-term. Our results substantiate the hypothesis that higher capital buffers can positively discipline banks by reducing risk-taking in the medium-term. At the same time, evidence suggests a limited adverse impact on the real economy, characterised by a temporary reduction in credit supply restricted to instances of macroprudential policy tightening.