Knowledge that Transforms

Few areas of monetary economics have been studied as extensively as the transmission mechanism. The literature on this topic has evolved substantially over the years, following the waxing and waning of conceptual frameworks and the changing characteristics of the financial system. In this paper, taking as a starting point a brief overview of the extant work on the interaction between capital regulation, the business cycle and the transmission mechanism, we offer some broader reflections on the characteristics of the transmission mechanism in light of the evolution of the financial system. We argue that insufficient attention has so far been paid to the link between monetary policy and the perception and pricing of risk by economic agents—what might be termed the “risk-taking channel” of monetary policy. We develop the concept, compare it with current views of the transmission mechanism, explore its mutually reinforcing link with “liquidity” and analyse its interaction with monetary policy reaction functions. We argue that changes in the financial system and prudential regulation may have increased the importance of the risk-taking channel and that prevailing macroeconomic paradigms and associated models are not well suited to capturing it, thereby also reducing their effectiveness as guides to monetary policy.

This paper develops a framework for analyzing socially and privately optimal bank loan-monitoring decisions, with and without capital regulation. In contrast to the monitoring decision of a social planner who seeks to maximize the utility of aggregate consumption, banks choose to monitor only if doing so is consistent with maximizing the market value of equity. As a consequence, socially and privately optimal monitoring choices can diverge. Under some circumstances, appropriately configured capital regulation can bring private loan-monitoring decisions into line with those of the social planner. Nevertheless, the capital ratio required to attain this outcome hinges on a number of factors that are likely to be economy-specific, including the banking system's monitoring technology and its exposure to default. Thus, it is unlikely that a unique capital ratio will be able to induce socially optimal monitoring in all economies.

This paper investigates the dual role of financial liberalization on growth using a bank crisis model and a growth model. It applies panel econometric techniques on data covering 34 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1983–2008. The results indicate that the growth retarding effects of financial liberalization, are dominant over growth enhancing effects, which show mixed results. The results also indicate that institutional variables, human capital formation and foreign aid are key factors in explaining growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. The study therefore recommends adoption of a ‘managed financial openness’ policy and institutional reform measures.

Using a large sample of accounting data for non-financial companies in France, this paper studies the interactions between macroeconomic shocks and companies’ financial fragility. We consider links in both directions, namely whether firms’ bankruptcies are affected by macroeconomic variables, and whether bankruptcies determine the business cycle. We estimate forecasting equations for firms’ bankruptcy using Shumway's (2001) approach and study the joint dynamics of bankruptcies and macroeconomic variables within an exogenous VAR type model estimated at the sector level. We find evidence of reciprocal links between the bankruptcy rate and the output gap and highlight significant “second round effects” of shocks to the output gap on bankruptcies. We show how taking into account the dynamic transmission of macroeconomic shocks matters in stress testing exercises.

This paper studies the factors that were associated with a bank's early exit from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in 2009. Executive pay restrictions were often a rationale cited for early TARP exit, and high levels of CEO pay in 2008 were associated with banks being significantly more likely to escape TARP. In addition, we find that larger publicly traded banks with better accounting performance, the stronger capital ratios, and fewer troubled loans and other assets exited early. Banks that raised private capital in 2009 were significantly more likely to return the taxpayers’ money early. The original eight TARP recipients, which received 165 billion of the 245 billion passed out, had weak tangible common equity ratios at the end of 2008, relative to other TARP recipients. Those eight banks raised common equity capital in 2009, and all at least partially exited the government's embrace.

This paper measures the systemic risk of a banking sector as a hypothetical distress insurance premium, identifies various sources of financial instability, and allocates systemic risk to individual financial institutions. The systemic risk measure, defined as the insurance cost to protect against distressed losses in a banking system, is a summary indicator of market perceived risk that reflects expected default risk of individual banks, risk premia as well as correlated defaults. An application of our methodology to a portfolio of twenty-two major banks in Asia and the Pacific illustrates the dynamics of the spillover effects of the global financial crisis to the region. The increase in the perceived systemic risk, particularly after the failure of Lehman Brothers, was mainly driven by the heightened risk aversion and the squeezed liquidity. Further analysis, which is based on our proposed approach to quantifying the marginal contribution of individual banks to the systemic risk, suggests that “too-big-to-fail” is a valid concern from a macro-prudential perspective of bank regulation.

An endogenous switching regression model is employed for this study, categorizing the banks into regimes of high and low degrees of diversification, with our results indicating that net interest margins can be less sensitive to fluctuations in bank risk factors for functionally diversified banks as compared to more specialized banks. In turn, this implies that by diversifying their income sources, these banks can reduce the shocks to net interest margins arising from idiosyncratic risk. Our results show that prior findings can hold when the banks are located in a regime with a low degree of diversification.

In the wake of the subprime crisis of 2007 which uncovered shortfalls in capital levels of most financial institutions, the Basel Committee planned to strengthen current regulations contained in Basel II. While maintaining the Internal Model Approach based on Value-at-Risk, a stressed VaR calculated over highly strung periods is to be added to present directives to constitute Minimum Capital Requirements. Consequently, the adoption of the appropriate VaR specification remains a subject of paramount importance as it determines the financial condition of the firm. In this article I explore the performance of several models to compute MCR in the context of Emerging and Frontier stock markets within the present and proposed capital structures. Considering the evidence gathered, two major contributions arise: (a) heavy-tailed distributions – particularly Extreme Value (EV) ones-, reveal as the most accurate technique to model market risks, hence preventing huge capital deficits under current measures; (b) the application of such methods could allow slight modifications to present mandate and simultaneously avoid sVaR or at least reduce its scope, thus mitigating the impact regarding the enhancement of capital base. Therefore, I suggest that the inclusion of EV in planned supervisory accords should reduce development costs and foster healthier financial structures.

Abstract We analyze whether banking supervision responsibilities should be concentrated in the hands of a single supervisor. We find that splitting supervisory powers among different supervisors is a superior arrangement in terms of social welfare to concentrating them in a single supervisor when the capture of supervisors by bankers is a concern. This result has implications for the design of banking supervisory architecture and informs current reform efforts in this field.

Abstract In many countries, Mutual Loan-Guarantee Societies (MGSs) are assuming ever-increasing importance for small business lending. In this paper we provide a theory to rationalize the raison d’être of MGSs. The basic intuition is that the motivation for MGSs lies in the inefficiencies created by adverse selection, when borrowers do not have enough wealth to satisfy collateral requirements and induce self-selecting contracts. In this setting, we view MGSs as a wealth-pooling mechanism that allows otherwise inefficiently rationed borrowers to obtain credit.