Knowledge that Transforms

This study investigates the relationship between the use of stock options and bank risk in the context of the 2007–2008 financial crisis for banks that are authorised to accept deposits in the United Kingdom. These banks are affected by the European regulation on variable pay, but, to our knowledge, their usage of stock options has not been examined in previous studies. Paying bankers with stock options can generate two types of managerial incentives, namely, incentives to improve performance and incentives to take risk. Controlling for incentives to improve performance, we find that banks’ total risk and insolvency risk increase with the risk-taking incentives induced by stock options. We also find that this relationship is more pronounced surrounding the crisis period. The findings of this study can serve as institutionally relevant empirical support for the European regulation on variable pay.

The modeling process of bubbles, using advanced mathematical and econometric techniques, is a young field of research. In this context, significant model misspecification could result from ignoring potential non-linearities. More precisely, the present paper attempts to detect and date non-linear bubble episodes. To do so, we use Neural Networks to capture the neglected non-linearities. Also, we provide a recursive dating procedure for bubble episodes. When using data on stock price-dividend ratio S&P500 (1871.1–2014.6), employing Bayesian techniques, the proposed approach identifies more episodes than other bubble tests in the literature, while the common episodes are, in general, found to have a longer duration, which is evidence of an early warning mechanism (EWM) that could have important policy implications.

The paper analyzes the influence of banking stability on the volatility of industrial value added using data for 110 countries. Our results confirm the relevance of lending and asset allocation effects because banking stability reduces the volatility of value added more in industries that have greater external financial dependence and intangible intensity when they are located in countries with more developed financial and institutional systems. Moreover, banking stability helps reduce economic volatility more in countries with less bank market competition. We control for recessions, reverse causality problems, and endogeneity of banking stability.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of nine non-interest rate policies on house prices and housing credit using data from 57 economies and periods of up to three decades. We find that introductions or reductions in the maximum debt-service-to-income ratio, and increases in housing-related taxes, have significant negative effects on housing credit, with a typical tightening action lowering the real credit growth rate by 4–6 percentage points and by 3–4 percentage points, respectively, over the subsequent four quarters. Increases in housing-related taxes moderate house price growth, with a typical increase slowing real house price appreciation by 3–4 percentage points over the same horizon.

This paper discusses the role of risk communication in macroprudential oversight and of visualization in risk communication. Beyond the increase in data availability and precision, the transition from firm-centric to system-wide supervision imposes vast data needs. Moreover, in addition to internal communication as in any organization, broad and effective external communication of timely information related to systemic risks is a key mandate of macroprudential supervisors. This further stresses the importance of simple representations of complex data. The present paper focuses on the background and theory of information visualization and visual analytics, as well as techniques within these fields, as potential means for risk communication. We define the task of visualization in risk communication, discuss the structure of macroprudential data, and review visualization techniques applied to systemic risk. We conclude that two essential, yet rare, features for supporting the analysis of big data and communication of risks are analytical visualizations and interactive interfaces. For visualizing the so-called macroprudential data cube, we provide the VisRisk platform with three modules: plots, maps and networks. While VisRisk is herein illustrated with five web-based interactive visualizations of systemic risk indicators and models, the platform enables and is open to the visualization of any data from the macroprudential data cube.

We quantify the linkages among banks’ equity performance and indicators of sovereign stress by using panel GMM to estimate a three-equation system that examines the impact of sovereign stress, as reflected in both sovereign spreads and sovereign ratings, on bank share prices. We use data for a panel of five euro-area stressed countries. Our findings indicate that a recursive relationship between sovereigns and banks operated during the euro-area crisis. Specifically, for the five crisis countries considered shocks to sovereign spreads fed-through to sovereign ratings, which affected commercial banks’ equity-prices. Our results also point to the importance of using levels of equity prices – rather than rates of return – in measuring banks’ performance. The use of levels allows us to derive the determinants of long-run equity prices.

We investigate households’ bank switching exploiting a unique representative dataset from Bank of Italy Survey on Household Income and Wealth that follows the households and their bank(s) over time. First, we document that bank switching is quite prevalent in our sample, with almost a quarter of households changing their main bank in a biannual horizon. Next, we relate the decision to switch to the features and dynamics of household bank relationship, and to the characteristics of both households and banks. In line with the switching cost theory, we find that using more than a single bank, as well as the intensity (number of services used), and the scope (bank services used) of the relationship with the main bank play a role in shaping the households’ decision to switch. Moreover, bank switching is strongly and positively correlated with both taking out and having paid off a mortgage.

This paper assesses the interrelationship between financial openness, bank risk and bank profit efficiency using a cross-country sample of 2007 commercial banks covering 140 countries over the period 1999–2011. To establish whether the impact of financial openness on both bank risk and profit efficiency occurs directly or through each one of the two bank characteristics (efficiency and risk, respectively), we begin our analysis by investigating the potential reverse Granger causality between profit efficiency and risk using a dynamic simultaneous model via system GMM estimation. We then account explicitly for the role of bank risk in the estimation of bank profit efficiency using stochastic frontier analysis, allowing for the influence of different measures of financial openness and risk alongside other control variables. Our results indicate that financial openness reduces bank profit efficiency directly, not through changes in bank risk. We also find that financial openness increases bank risk indirectly, through the decreased bank profit efficiency channel.

We investigate a simple dynamical model for the systemic risk caused by the use of Value-at-Risk, as mandated by Basel II. The model consists of a bank with a leverage target and an unleveraged fundamentalist investor subject to exogenous noise with clustered volatility. The parameter space has three regions: (i) a stable region, where the system has a fixed point equilibrium; (ii) a locally unstable region, characterized by cycles with chaotic behavior; and (iii) a globally unstable region. A calibration of parameters to data puts the model in region (ii). In this region there is a slowly building price bubble, resembling the period prior to the Global Financial Crisis, followed by a crash resembling the crisis, with a period of approximately 10–15 years. We dub this the Basel leverage cycle. To search for an optimal leverage control policy we propose a criterion based on the ability to minimize risk for a given average leverage. Our model allows us to vary from the procyclical policies of Basel II or III, in which leverage decreases when volatility increases, to countercyclical policies in which leverage increases when volatility increases. We find the best policy depends on the market impact of the bank. Basel II is optimal when the exogenous noise is high, the bank is small and leverage is low; in the opposite limit where the bank is large and leverage is high the optimal policy is closer to constant leverage. In the latter regime systemic risk can be dramatically decreased by lowering the leverage target adjustment speed of the banks. While our model does not show that the financial crisis and the period leading up to it were due to VaR risk management policies, it does suggest that it could have been caused by VaR risk management, and that the housing bubble may have just been the spark that triggered the crisis.

We assess the relative effect of securitization activity on banks’ lending rates employing a uniquely detailed dataset from the euro-denominated syndicated loan market. We find that in the run-up to the 2007–2009 crisis banks more active at originating asset-backed securities did not price their loans more aggressively (i.e. with narrower lending spreads) than non-active banks. We show that also within the set of loans that were previously securitized, the relative level of securitization activity by the originating bank is not related to narrower lending spreads. Our findings, which are limited to the cross-sectional impact of securitization, suggest that the effect of securitization on the cost of corporate funding appears to be quite limited.