Knowledge that Transforms

We analyse the default behaviour of Spanish households immediately before and after the recent financial crisis. Using several waves of the Survey of Household Finances (a tri-annual survey of financial position of Spanish households), we show that younger, poorer and less well educated households are most likely to default. A key contribution is to explain the change in arrears since the onset of the crisis. Using information on credit applications and acceptances we decompose the change in arrears among all households into a contribution from four parts: (i) changes in characteristics; (ii) changes in applications; (iii) changes in acceptances; (iv) changes in arrears among borrowers. We show the last is the most important contribution.

We construct a measure of systemic vulnerability in selected EU banking systems using an indirect, time-varying measure of the system covariance. Systemic vulnerability indicates the extent to which a banking system as a whole is sensitive to a negative shock. We proceed to examine to what extent the resulting measures of systemic vulnerability provide a convincing narrative of events during the period January 2000 to April 2016. The results provide evidence of: (i) rising vulnerability prior to the outbreak of the international financial crisis in 2007/08 in countries with banks exposed to toxic assets; (ii) vulnerability associated with the euro area sovereign debt crisis from 2009/10; and (iii) continued concerns from 2013 onwards regarding the need for euro area banks to improve their balance sheets and raise new capital at a time of sluggish profitability.

Commodity producing corporations have trillions of dollars in outstanding debt. Thus, the recent fall in commodity prices raised concerns about sustainability and systemic risks. Using a global sample (2003- 2015) we measure how corporate bonds react to the underlying commodity price. On average a 10% change in the commodity moves yields-to-maturity by only 15 basis points. This is just a tenth of the sensitivity of stocks returns. Nonetheless, bond sensitivity to commodities is significantly stronger for smaller, leveraged and less profitable firms. Also for short maturity bonds. The type of commodity price change matters too. Sensitivity to price drops is at least five times stronger than to increases. Transitory price changes matter for shorter maturities and leveraged firms. In contrast, longer maturities react more to permanent commodity variations. When firms use hedging derivatives, bonds are less sensitive to all price variations. Hedging mitigates the amplification of commodity shocks, as in Shiller (2008). In conclusion, while debt finance deteriorated with the commodity bust, it hardly dried-up.

An interdependent network coupling financial institutions’ multiplex (i.e. multi-layer) and financial market infrastructures’ single-layer networks gives a more accurate picture of a financial system's true connective architecture. We examine and compare the main properties of Colombian multiplex and interdependent financial networks. Coupling financial institutions’ multiplex networks with financial market infrastructures’ networks removes modularity, which augments financial instability because the network then fails to isolate feedbacks and limit cascades while it retains its robust-yet-fragile features. Moreover, our analysis highlights the relevance of infrastructure-related systemic risk, corresponding to the effects caused by the improper functioning of financial market infrastructures or by financial market infrastructures acting as conduits for contagion.

In light of the renewed challenge to construct effective “Early Warning Systems” for sovereign debt crises, we empirically evaluate the predictive power of econometric models developed so far across developed and emerging country regions. We propose a different specification of the crisis variable that allows for the prediction of new crisis onsets as well as duration, and develop a more powerful dynamic-recursive forecasting technique to generate more accurate out-of-sample warning signals of sovereign debt crises. Our results are shown to be more accurate compared to the ones found in the existing literature.

Using an international panel of 104 countries over the period 1995–2012, we analyze the relationship between country-level securitization and economic activity. Our findings suggest that securitization is negatively related to various proxies of economic activity – even prior to the crisis of 2007–2009. We explain this finding as the results of securitization spurring consumption at the expense of investment and capital formation. Consistent with this, we find that securitization of household loans is negatively associated with economic activity, whereas business securitization displays a weak positive association with it, and that household securitization increases an economy's consumption-investment ratio. Our results inform recent initiatives aimed at reviving securitization markets, as they indicate that the impact of securitization crucially depends on the underlying collateral.

In response to the economic and financial crisis, the EU has adopted a new regulatory framework of the banking sector. Its central elements consist of new capital requirements, the single rulebook, and rules for bank recovery and resolution. These legislations have been adopted to reduce the call for government bail-out of distressed banks in future crises. The present study performs a detailed quantitative assessment of the reduction in public finance costs brought about by the introduction of these rules. We use a microsimulation portfolio model, which implements the Basel risk assessment framework, to estimate the joint distribution of bank losses at EU level. The approach incorporates the complete safety-net set up in EU legislation to absorb these losses, explicitly modelling enhanced Basel III capital rules, the bail-in tool and the resolution funds. Using a near-full sample of commercial, cooperative and savings banks in the EU, we quantify the cumulative effects of this safety-net and the contribution of each individual tool to the total effect. Considering a crisis of a similar magnitude as the recent one, our results show that potential costs for public finances decrease from roughly 3.7% of EU GDP (before the introduction of any new tool) to 1.4% with bail-in, and finally to 0.5% when all the elements we model are in place. This latter amount is very close to our estimate of leftover resolution funds and the size of the Deposit Guarantee Scheme. This exercise extends the quantitative analyses performed by the European Commission in its Economic Review of the Financial Regulation Agenda by developing additional scenarios, crucial robustness checks, simulations for different annual data vintages, and by implementing some methodological improvements.

We examine the effects of bank’s political connection on bank performance and risk in China. We use hand-collected information on CEOs’ professional background to identify their political affiliations, and find that banks whose CEOs have former government experiences have higher return on assets, lower default risk, and lower credit risk. Additionally, politically connected banks have disproportionally higher performance when the CEOs previous worked in the same city where the current bank’s headquarter locates, had past banking experiences, spend more on entertainment and travel costs, and have higher previous administrative rankings (e.g., at the provincial or state level). These results suggest that politically connected banks have better access to lending to politically connected firms, which are high yield assets and more likely to be bailed out when in distress. Our results offer a mechanism of political rent seeking, consistent with the institutional environment of China’s banking and political system.

This paper examines which variables have predictive power for financial stress in 25 OECD countries, using a recently constructed financial stress index (FSI). First, we employ Bayesian model averaging to identify leading indicators of stress. Next, we use those indicators as explanatory variables in a panel model for all countries and in models at the individual country level. It turns out that panel models can hardly explain FSI dynamics. Although better results are achieved in country models, our findings suggest that (increases in) financial stress is (are) hard to predict out-of-sample despite the reasonably good in-sample performance of the models.

A sovereign debt crisis can have significant knock-on effects in the financial markets and put financial stability at risk. This paper focuses on the transmission of sovereign risk to insurance companies as some of the largest institutional investors in the sovereign bond market. We use a firm level panel dataset that covers large insurance companies, banks and non-financial firms from nine countries over the time period from 1 January 2008–1 May 2013. We find significant and robust transmission effects from sovereign risk to domestic insurers. The impact on insurers is not significantly different from that on banks but larger than for non-financial firms. We find that systemically important insurers are more closely linked to the domestic sovereign. Based on European data, we show that risks in sovereign bond portfolios are an important driver of insurer risk, which is not reflected in current insurance regulation (incl. Solvency II in Europe).