In this study, we examine the impact of liquidity support from the Federal Reserve on the capital structures of firms of varying sizes. Our findings suggest that large firms tend to increase their debt financing and leverage ratios in response to significant shocks triggered by the large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs) of the US Federal Reserve. By contrast, small firms with preexisting banking relationships are more likely to receive liquidity support. Notably, small firms associated with smaller banks exhibit increased default risks. Furthermore, large firms exhibited weaker operating performance but received greater managerial compensation following the LSAP. This trend indicates potential inefficiencies in the distribution of funding facilitated by unconventional monetary policies.
The 2023 banking turmoil highlighted how technological advancements have significantly accelerated the speed of bank runs. This paper investigates the impact of these faster bank runs on the effectiveness of policy interventions by interpreting them as a constraint on the relative speed of policy responses. Using a model of bank runs and ex-post policy responses, we examine how delays caused by this constraint affect financial fragility and welfare. We find that while delays exacerbate welfare loss by distorting allocations, they may also decrease fragility by making banks more cautious. We study the optimal level of structural delay, balancing the trade-off between distributional distortions and financial fragility. Furthermore, we extend this model to explore the roles of liquidity regulations and capital injections given such a delay. We show that regulation may be more desirable than a capital injection if the delay is substantial because the benefit of decreased fragility is particularly potent.
This study aims to empirically identify the state of the US housing market. I do so by estimating a Markov switching model of housing prices, in which mortgage debt affects house prices nonlinearly and drives state transition probabilities. Second, I compute a state-contingent housing risk measure fed with the probability of being in each state. Finally, I show that such risk measure contains early warning information in a forecasting exercise to predict the charge-off rates of real estate residential loans and a financial stress index. The significance of this study is that it informs economic agents and policymakers about the state of the housing market mechanically.
The regulatory dialectic describes the dynamic process of banks and regulators continuously acting and reacting to one another. We provide empirical evidence of the regulatory dialectic in the prime institutional money market fund (PI-MMF) industry. Regulations on commercial deposits fueled growth in bank-sponsored PI-MMFs as a form of shadow banking in a relatively less regulated market. Re-regulation following the 2008 financial crisis halted this rapid growth, and the industry shifted from PI-MMFs to government institutional MMFs. We conjecture that this dialectical process will continue, and the decline of the PI-MMF may engender a shift toward structurally similar products, like stablecoins.
Compared with the previous literature on external FinTech, this paper is more interested in the role played by bank FinTech. On the basis of panel data from Chinese commercial banks spanning 2010–2021, this paper investigates the impact of digital transformation on bank soundness and its potential mechanisms. The empirical findings demonstrate a positive association between digital transformation and bank soundness, driven primarily by strategic and management digitization. Mechanistic analysis indicates that digital transformation improves bank soundness by mitigating risk-taking behavior and promoting diversification. The positive effect of digital transformation is more pronounced in state-owned and joint-stock banks, banks with higher liquidity mismatch and in the subsamples with greater levels of external FinTech development and economic policy uncertainty. Additional analysis suggests that digital transformation can still enhance bank soundness even in the presence of relatively lenient monetary and macroprudential policies, highlighting the harmonization and complementarity between internal innovation from digital transformation and external regulatory policies in maintaining banking stability. Overall, this paper contributes to the literature on bank FinTech, which focuses on the factors influencing bank stability. This study also provides a novel explanation for the relationship between financial innovation and financial stability.
This paper investigates whether the design of the banking supervisory architecture impacts sovereign risk. Exploiting the implementation of the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) in Europe, we provide evidence that sovereign risk – measured by sovereign ratings – is lower after the largest banks shift from national to supranational supervision. The impact of SSM implementation is shaped by the characteristics of the banking sector and the country’s institutional setting. Using specific bank-level data, we also find that increased bank resilience (banking stability) and reduced volatility of bank credit (credit stability) in the economy underlie the relationship between banking supervision and sovereign risk. The results hold when considering CDS spreads as an alternative measure of sovereign risk and after conducting several robustness tests.
This paper investigates the impact of country-level governance on corporate investment efficiency using data from Indian-listed firms between 2009 and 2022. Additionally, we explore how country-level governance interacts with firm-level corporate governance to influence investment inefficiency. Using World Bank's worldwide governance indicators, our findings from panel econometric models reveal that country-level governance and its subcomponents (political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, control of corruption, and voice and accountability) negatively affect investment inefficiency, underinvestment, and overinvestment. This suggests that robust governance at country-level serves as a control mechanism, reducing companies' likelihood of investing above or below optimal levels. Furthermore, we find that the effect of firm-level corporate governance (measured using a newly constructed governance index) on investment inefficiency is more pronounced in weak country-level governance environments, indicating a substitutive relationship. Similar patterns are observed in overinvestment and underinvestment scenarios. This evidence implies that when country-level governance is inadequate in mitigating agency conflicts and information asymmetries, firm-level corporate governance mechanisms become crucial for promoting investment efficiency. The robustness of our results is ensured through various methodological approaches. Sample selection bias is addressed using entropy balancing, while endogeneity concerns are mitigated with a combination of two-stage least squares, firm fixed effects, and a two-step generalized method of moments. Additionally, our findings remain consistent when using different proxies for both dependent and independent variables. Our empirical investigation provides valuable insights for regulators, policymakers, and corporate stakeholders in developing efficient investment policies.
We investigate the impact of “learning from peers” on the fundraising abilities of startup companies. Employing data on the financing rounds of privately owned portfolio companies, we find that companies observe the round amounts of their most successful peers and learn to negotiate higher round amounts with venture capital investors. We further show that the number of common directors or venture capital firms between portfolio companies and their most successful peers has a positive impact on the round amounts of these portfolio companies, which supports the existence of conversational learning. Moreover, observational learning from peers is higher in hot markets, where investors rely on less costly information on peers. Our findings confirm that both observational and conversational learning allow portfolio companies to be in a better negotiating position, thus enhancing their ability to secure funding and invest in their growth.
We examine whether gender diversity at the target firm influences acquisition decisions by gender-diverse firms. Our findings show that gender-diverse acquirers are more likely to select gender-diverse targets over male-only firms. This preference is driven by specific attributes of female directors at the target firm, such as their educational and professional qualifications, networking abilities, functional experience, and industry expertise. Gender-diverse acquirers pay a lower premium to gender-diverse targets compared to male-only targets, and these acquisitions are positively received by the market, reflected in significant announcement-period abnormal returns. Additionally, gender-diverse firms that acquire gender-diverse targets show stronger post-acquisition performance compared to those acquiring male-only targets. These findings remain robust after addressing potential endogeneity concerns, including omitted variable bias and reverse causality.
We investigate the resilience of the South African banking sector by applying a dynamic agent-based model and the DebtRank algorithm. In contrast to previous studies focusing on listed banks, our methodology includes both listed and non-listed institutions that make up the banking industry, thereby capturing the systemic importance and vulnerability of all banks within the interbank market network. Our findings indicate that while larger banks exhibit greater systemic importance, a statistically significant correlation exists between a bank’s interbank-lending-to-equity ratio and vulnerability. Moreover, a bank’s size and specific interbank activities influence its systemic contribution, both in terms of importance and vulnerability. These insights offer policymakers an empirically grounded framework for improving financial stability monitoring and risk mitigation efforts.