Knowledge that Transforms

We study the relation between firm financial stability and gender diversity in leadership and highlight its dependence on the initial financial conditions of the firm and the role played by the women leaders. Consistent with the glass cliff and the upper echelon theories, we find that close-to-default firms are more likely to appoint women top executives and that under their leadership, subsequent firms’ risk of default decreases in the short to medium term. In parallel, independent women directors are not associated with firms’ past credit risk, and their presence is more likely to increase the firm’s subsequent default risk, as established by the tokenism and signaling theory. Our results are robust to alternative specifications and endogeneity corrections.

We investigate how a change in regulatory oversight affects bank risk, using the passage of the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act of 2018 as a setting. Using a sample of bank holding companies (BHCs) covering the period 2015Q1 through 2020Q1, we find that risk increases for large BHCs affected by a change in regulatory oversight. In addition to increasing bank level risk, affected BHCs increase their respective contribution to the systemic risk. These BHCs also experience higher profitability, increased market valuation and reduced compliance costs.

Prudential bank regulation complicates monetary policy because it has cyclical effects on the growth of bank credit, which can be a channel through which monetary policy is transmitted to the economy. Employing a panel of 36 advanced and developing countries for the period 1973–2015, we find that changes in regulation have been procyclical with respect to credit surges and counter-cyclical with respect to credit stops. As a result, monetary policy risks being too loose over the credit cycle. The economic effects of prudential regulation on credit have been meaningful given the large-scale bank liberalizations undertaken by many countries. The result is robust to dealing with a wide range of sensitivity tests and endogeneity concerns. In designing regulations, policymakers need to consider transmission mechanisms through which they might affect the real economy and undermine the goals of monetary policy.

The aim of this study is to disentangle the effects of introducing an interest-bearing central bank digital currency (CBDC) for financial stability using a Diamond and Dybvig (1983) model in which (i) both CBDC and private bank deposits can be used in exchange and (ii) liquidity is created endogenously. Agents have direct access to a CBDC, which is a claim on the central bank. They use both sight deposits and CBDC to buy goods and commercial banks borrow reserves to cover liquidity needs. The introduction of an interest-bearing CBDC has direct implications for the sight deposit rate and the loan rate of banks. Besides, if the central bank aims to have a positive net worth and the absence of bank runs, a high demand for a CBDC is a necessary condition to achieve both objectives. If this is not the case, financial stability will be endangered.

We surveyed experts from academia, central banks, and other regulatory institutions on the preferred institutional setup of macroprudential policy and the underlying interactions stemming from the conduct of monetary and macroprudential policy. We find substantial support for the integration setup, under which macroprudential policy is entrusted to the central bank and not to a separate institution. The most significant factors driving the respondents’ views are the large degree of interdependence of the two policies, the potential information gains from keeping them “under one roof”, and a greater capability to resolve strategic conflicts. We identify non-negligible heterogeneity in the responses, especially in terms of respondents’ experience, expertise, and position.

This paper estimates unobserved components (UC) models with real and financial trends and business and credit cycles to assess different measures of the credit cycle used by policymakers. The permanent components of the real and financial sectors are a Beveridge–Nelson and local linear trend, respectively. The business and credit cycles evolve jointly as a second-order vector autoregression . Bootstrap methods are applied to UC model estimates retrieved from classical optimization of the predictive likelihood of the Kalman filter . Results indicate the slope of the financial trend better predicts the credit to GDP ratio in the United States than the estimated business and credit cycles and the Basel gap. This suggests policymakers should consider permanent shocks to the financial sector when gauging the state of financial stability .

Using a model of strategic interactions between two countries, I investigate the gains to international coordination of financial regulation policies, and how these gains depend on global lending conditions. When one region – the core – sets global lending conditions, I show that coordinating regulatory policies makes the two regions better-off relative to the case of no cooperation. Global lending conditions set by the core are typically sub-optimal for the other region – the periphery –. To reduce this cost, the periphery can tighten its regulatory policy. Yet, in doing so, it fails to internalise a cross-border externality: when the periphery tightens its regulatory policy, agents in the core reduce cross-border borrowing, which tightens global lending conditions and hurts the periphery. The cooperative equilibrium can improve on this outcome. Both regions take into account the cross-border externality, leading to larger cross-border borrowing and less sub-optimal lending conditions for the periphery.

We study the effect of governments’ fiscal support on banks’ loan loss provisioning during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, we decompose fiscal support into direct support and liquidity support to examine the effect of different types of support measures on banks’ loan loss provisioning. Direct support generally refers to cash transfers, tax reliefs, and tax deferrals, while liquidity support generally refers to government-backed loans and equity injections. We find that direct support reduced banks’ loan portfolio risk whereas liquidity support did not. Moreover, we find the effect goes beyond a macroeconomic stabilization effect, suggesting that direct support directly contributed to mitigating banks’ loan portfolio risk during the pandemic. Our results are robust to controlling for other policy interventions, alternative model specifications, and an instrumental variable approach. We further discuss the policy implications of our analysis.

We study the relationship between climate change and financial systemic risk. First, we test whether, to what extent and how quickly the systemic risk of US banking and insurance sectors reacts to billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. We prove that some extreme events can exacerbate financial systemic risk and provide insights about the different timing at which the reaction of the systemic risk measures takes place. Second, we investigate through quantile regressions how the performance of green and brown market indexes affects the systemic risk of the two US financial sectors. We observe that higher levels of the green indexes reduce systemic risk more than a raise in brown indexes, with an increasing magnitude in tail conditions. A raise in the riskiness of the green indexes seems to significantly increase systemic risk, with the effect being stronger than that of an increase in the riskiness of brown indexes. Our results confirm the importance of the adoption of appropriate policies aiming at contrasting the raise in the frequency and severity of climate disasters. Our findings are also important in the perspective of the likely increase (decrease) in the exposure of financial firms towards green (brown) companies, induced by the policy decisions taken to combat climate change, and in terms of the implications for banks’ and insurers’ risk management models and procedures.

Using unique hand-collected data for 336 large banks across 48 countries, together with values of national culture, our empirical analysis uncovers three new robust findings. First, variations of bank risk-taking across national culture and CEO power are more pronounced when cultural values and CEO power indicators are high. Second, while the individualism dimension of national culture has a moderating influence, the uncertainty avoidance dimension has a reinforcing effect, on the relationship between CEO power and bank risk-taking. In more detail, the results for the average marginal effect of CEO power on risk for different cultural values show that CEO power has a negative (positive) or insignificant impact on bank risk-taking when the value of individualism (uncertainty avoidance) is low; however, the impact becomes positive (negative) and statistically significant as the value of individualism (uncertainty avoidance) increases. Third, intra-cultural diversity matters: ‘tight’ cultures (e.g., strong social norms) are more pronounced than ‘loose’ cultures (e.g., heterogeneous values) in influencing bank risk.