Knowledge that Transforms

The paper analyzes the effect of changes in eight types of bank-oriented macroprudential policies on bank competition and stability. Using a bank-level database of a maximum of 2511 listed banks from 52 countries, I find that a tightening in bank-oriented macroprudential policies on average increases both bank competition and stability. However, there are differences across policies and countries. Loan supply and liquidity-based policies increase bank competition whereas capital and tax-based policies reduce bank competition. Tighter legal restrictions on entry and activity in a country reduce the positive (increase the negative) effect of macroprudential policies on bank competition. In terms of policy implications, I identify a sub-set of especially useful macroprudential policies that increase not only financial stability but also bank competition.

Long CEO tenure can harm firm performance even after the CEO is replaced. We analyze this issue by conditioning post-turnover firm performance on the length of the preceding CEO’s tenure. Identification comes from instrumenting sudden CEO deaths as an exogenous shock to tenure length. We find that when a successor takes over after a long-tenured CEO, operating performance and stock returns are significantly lower, restructuring costs are higher, “big baths” are larger, and firm recovery is slower. Weaker corporate governance and a long-tenured CEO with lower skills amplify these post-turnover effects.

The broad economic damage of the COVID-19 pandemic poses the first major test of the bank regulatory reforms put in place after the Global Financial Crisis. Our study assesses the U.S. regulatory framework, with an emphasis on capital and liquidity requirements. Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, banks were well capitalized and held ample liquid assets, which partly reflects enhanced requirements. The overall robust capital and liquidity levels resulted in a resilient banking system, which maintained lending and market making through the early stages of the pandemic. Trading activity was a source of strength for banks, reflecting in part a prudent regulatory approach. That said, leverage requirements are associated with more repo position netting by banks, with potential implications for market making.

We empirically evaluate how accounting and financial variables affect the level of systemic risk in traditional and shadow banks, and in real estate finance services in China over the period 2006–2019. We also conduct some stability analysis by evaluating the impact of crisis sub-periods. We find that systemic risk increases in the Size of large financial institutions, particularly shadow entities, while it is insensitive to the Size of real estate finance services. Real estate finance services are instead particularly sensitive to Maturity Mismatch and Leverage. Finally, systemic risk differs across state and non state owned banks.

We study the impact of higher bank capital requirements on corporate lending spreads using granular bank- and loan-level data. Our empirical strategy employs the heterogeneity in capital requirements across banks and time of implementation in Switzerland. We find that changes in the capital deviation from the regulatory minimum affect lending spreads asymmetrically. In response to a reduction in the capital deviation, banks with deficits with respect to their risk-weighted capital requirement raise spreads relative to banks with surpluses and de-leverage. Banks respond to higher requirements by raising spreads and, for deficit banks, by cutting lending.

We examine the likelihood that the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS), in its enforcement role, will accord particular attention to firms that are managed by CEOs who exhibit over-confidence, given that such CEOs may be more aggressive in their tax policies and strategies. Using data from 7757 firms, we find that this is indeed the case. Such attention is even more pronounced in the instance of overconfident CEOs whose firms are financially constrained and/or financially distressed. We also find that the IRS has augmented its audit processes to give more attention to overconfident CEOs during and post financial crisis. This may be due to the increased vulnerability of their firms to external shocks, which consequently increases the incentives to embark on tax avoidance strategies, value-destroying investments, and/or highly biased financial reporting (and forecasting responses) to tax authorities. Our results are robust after accounting for the possibility of endogeneity and using a wide range of specifications, measures, and econometric models.

This paper analyzes the evolution of Milton Friedman’s thinking about bailouts. It covers bailouts of commercial banks, shadow banks and other financial firms, manufacturing firms, governments, financial markets, and other cases where the term is commonly used. It is based on his academic writings and on the many interviews, op-eds, letters to the editor, and so on through which he communicated his views during and after his transition from professor to public intellectual.

In this paper, we explore whether economic uncertainty differently affects the default risk of Islamic and conventional banks. Using a sample of 568 banks from 20 countries between 2009 and 2018, we use the World Uncertainty Index (WUI) by Ahir et al. (2018) to conduct a study based on a comparable measure across countries. Our findings indicate that economic uncertainty increases the default risk of conventional banks but does not affect Islamic banks’ default risk. To understand why, we explore the influence of religiosity, institutional factors, and bank-level heterogeneity. We observe that Islamic banks’ default risk is not significantly affected by uncertainty in all types of countries, but such a difference with conventional banks mainly holds for banks with higher income diversification, larger size, and that are publicly traded. Moreover, our findings show that conventional banks suffer more from uncertainty in terms of stability in countries with higher religiosity and with a higher share of profit-loss sharing (PLS) contracts. Our results are robust to alternative estimation techniques to deal with endogeneity and to alternative variable measurements.

In this paper, we examine the role of political connections in mitigating the detrimental impact of policy uncertainty on banks. Our estimates show that banks are more cautious when facing policy uncertainty, but that the effect is partially alleviated when banks are politically connected. For an increase of one standard deviation in policy uncertainty, connected banks maintain a loss provision to loan volume ratio that is almost seven percent lower compared to their unconnected peers. These findings are robust to a geographical regression discontinuity setting, as well as to a placebo test. Lastly, the mitigating role of political connections is driven mainly by smaller banks and periods of stricter banking regulations.