Knowledge that Transforms

In comparison to bank financing, public debt market may allow firms to more readily match maturity and risk structures between their assets and liabilities. We test whether new issuers on the European corporate bond markets experience a change in their interest rate sensitivity upon their bond issuance. We find that stock returns have become significantly less sensitive to interest rate fluctuations for firms that enter the publicly traded bond market. Our findings support the notion that firms manage their interest rate risk with new debt issues.

We propose a model in which banks are exposed to the risk of contagion through their portfolio of loans. We show that a solvency problem in one bank can be transmitted to another if they lend to the same borrower. The novelty is that the channel for the transmission involves banks’ monitoring incentives. The intensity with which all banks monitor a common borrower is reduced when one of the banks suffers a solvency shock. The reduced effort intensity affects the borrower's probability of success and creates a contagion (endogenous correlation) from the balance-sheet of the affected bank to the balance-sheet of the other banks lending to the same borrower. Banks hit by a solvency shock have lower incentives to monitor borrowers because less is left after paying depositors. Banks not hit by a solvency shock face borrowers’ risks entirely on their own, which increases the expected cost of lending. As a consequence, they respond by reducing the monitoring intensity for the common borrower. Bank equity can mitigate the risk of contagion.

International audience

We examine the effect of competition and business cycles on bank capital buffers around the world. We use a dataset of 3461 banks from 25 developed and 54 developing countries over the 2001–2013 period. Banks tend on average to exhibit pro-cyclical behavior. But capital buffers seem to be more pro-cyclical in developing countries. Our results show that more competition leads to higher buffers in developed countries but to lower buffers in developing ones. This evidence suggests that the “competition-stability” thesis adheres in developed economies, whereas “competition-fragility” makes more sense in developing countries. This asymmetric result may have important policy implications, particularly with regard to new, globally-negotiated capital adequacy standards.

We study the association between daily changes in short selling activity and financial stock prices during extreme events using TailCoR, a measure of tail correlation. For the largest European and US banks, as well as European insurers, we uncover a strong relation during exceptional (extreme) days and a weak relation during normal (average) days. Examining days with large increases in short positions and large downfalls in stock prices, we find evidence of both momentum and contrarian short selling taking place. For North American bank stocks, contrarian short selling appears more practiced than for European bank and insurance stocks. We find that the uncovered relationship decreases with firm size and increases during ban periods, which is in line with short selling becoming more informative when constrained.

Financial networks have shown to be important in understanding systemic events in credit markets. In this paper, we investigate how the structure of those networks can affect the capacity of regulators to assess the level of systemic risk. We introduce a model to compute the individual and systemic probability of default in a system of banks connected in a generic network of credit contracts and exposed to external shocks with a generic correlation structure. Even in the presence of complete knowledge, we identify conditions on the network for the emergence of multiple equilibria. Multiple equilibria give rise to uncertainty in the determination of the default probability. We show how this uncertainty can affect the estimation of systemic risk in terms of expected losses. We further quantify the effects of cyclicality, leverage, volatility and correlations. Our results are relevant to the current policy discussions on new regulatory framework to deal with systemic events of distress as well as on the desirable level of regulatory data disclosure.

This paper shows that the revised loan loss provisioning based on the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and the US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) implies a reduction of Tier 1 capital. The paper finds in a counterfactual analysis that these changes are more severe (i) during economic downturns, (ii) for credit portfolios of low quality, (iii) for banks that do not tighten capital standards during downturns, and (iv) under a more comprehensive definition of significant increase in credit risk (SICR) under IFRS. The provisioning rules further increase the procyclicality of bank capital requirements. Adjustments of the SICR threshold or capital buffers are suggested as ways to mitigate a regulatory pressure that may emerges due to the reduction of regulatory capital.

This paper analyzes various channels of shock transmission in an economy subject to financial frictions, by incorporating liquidity and default effects on asset prices. We develop a framework in which we can assess financial stability policy by introducing a simplified model of exchange and financial intermediation that captures the effects of shocks on financial and real sectors of the economy. The model allows us to explain essential mechanisms and interactions of financial and real economic variables in a comprehensive, yet intuitive fashion. Our results suggest that liquidity and default in the credit markets should be analyzed contemporaneously when financial, monetary and productivity shocks affect financial stability as well as the real economy.

We develop a framework to analyse the credit default swap (CDS) market as a network of risk transfers among counterparties. From a theoretical perspective, we introduce the notion of flow-of-risk and provide sufficient conditions for a bow-tie network architecture to endogenously emerge as a result of intermediation. This architecture shows three distinct sets of counterparties: (i) Ultimate Risk Sellers (URS), (ii) Dealers (indirectly connected to each other), (iii) Ultimate Risk Buyers (URB). We show that the probability of widespread distress due to counterparty risk is higher in a bow-tie architecture than in more fragmented network structures. Empirically, we analyse a unique global dataset of bilateral CDS exposures on major sovereign and financial reference entities in 2011–2014. We find the presence of a bow-tie network architecture consistently across both reference entities and time, and that the flow-of-risk originates from a large number of URSs (e.g. hedge funds) and ends up in a few leading URBs, most of which are non-banks (in particular asset managers). Finally, the analysis of the CDS portfolio composition of the URBs shows a high level of concentration: in particular, the top URBs often show large exposures to potentially correlated reference entities.

Previous work suggests that the charter value hypothesis is theoretically grounded and empirically supported, but not universally. Accordingly, this paper aims to perform an analysis of the relations between charter value, risk taking, and supervision, taking into account the relations’ complexity. Specifically, using the CAMELS rating system as a general framework for supervision, we study how charter value relates to risk and supervision by means of classification and regression tree analysis. The sample covers the period 2005–2016 and consists of listed banks in countries that were members of the Eurozone when it came into existence, along with Greece. To evaluate the crisis consequences, we also separately analyze four subperiods and countries that required financial aid from third parties and those that did not so, along with large and small banks. Our results reflect the complexity of the relations between charter value, supervision, and risk. Indeed, supervision and charter value seem aligned regarding only some types of risk.