Knowledge that Transforms

To mitigate potential contagion from future banking crises, the European Commission recently proposed a framework which would provide for the bail-in of bank creditors in the event of failure. In this study, we examine this framework retrospectively in the context of failed European banks during the global financial crisis. Empirical findings suggest that equity and subordinated bond holders would have been the main losers from the €535 billion impairment losses realized by failed European banks. Losses attributed to senior debt holders would, on aggregate, have been proportionally small, while no losses would have been imposed on depositors. Cross-country analysis, incorporating stress-tests, reveals a divergence of outcomes with subordinated debt holders wiped out in a number of countries, while senior debt holders of Greek, Austrian and Irish banks would have required bail-in.

We propose a framework for testing the effects of changes in bank resolution regimes on bank behavior. By exploiting the differential relevance of recent changes in U.S. bank resolution (i.e., the introduction of the Orderly Liquidation Authority, OLA) for different types of banks, we are able to simulate a quasi-natural experiment using a difference-in-difference framework. We find that banks that are more affected by the introduction of the OLA (1) significantly decrease their overall risk-taking and (2) shift their loan origination toward lower risk, indicating the general effectiveness of the regime change. This effect, however, does (3) not hold for the largest and most systemically important banks. Hence, the introduction of the OLA in the U.S. alone does not appear to have solved the too-big-to-fail problem and might need to be complemented with other measures to limit financial institutions’ risk-taking.

The global financial crisis brought government guarantees to the forefront of the debate. Based on a review of frictions that hinder financial contracting, this paper concludes that the common justifications for government guarantees—i.e., principal-agent frictions or un-internalized externalities in an environment of risk neutrality—are flawed. Even where risk is purely idiosyncratic—and thus diversifiable in principle—government guarantees (typically granted via development banks/agencies) can be justified if private lenders are risk averse and because of the state's comparative advantage over markets in resolving the collective action frictions that hinder risk spreading. To exploit this advantage while keeping moral hazard in check, however, development banks/agencies have to price their guarantees fairly, crowd in the private sector, and reduce their excessive risk aversion. The latter requires overcoming agency frictions between managers and owner (the state), which would likely entail a significant reshaping of development banks’ mandates, governance, and risk management systems.

This paper presents a new view on the gold price of greenbacks during and after the American Civil War by analyzing exchange-rate volatility rather than exchange-rate levels. Our empirical investigation detects regimes of high and low volatility alternating in a way that is consistent with a theoretical exchange-rate model in which the rate is primarily driven by investors’ expectations and not by fundamentals. We interpret these findings as evidence that monetary policy makers were surprisingly able to credibly announce the resumption to gold half a year before it actually took place on January 1, 1879. Given the intense political debate about the appropriate design of the United States’ financial system, this is a remarkable result. It indicates that the policy makers’ ability to anchor investors’ expectations is relevant to achieving asset-price stability as well as effectiveness of financial market regulation. The insights from this historical episode should therefore be of interest to policy makers and regulators combating financial crises like the ongoing current debt crises worldwide.

The current financial crisis is the 19th such crisis in the post-war period in advanced economies. Recent literature classifies the Nordic crises in Norway, Sweden and Finland in late 1980s and early 1990s among the Big Five crises that have happened before the current crisis, which is now of a global nature. This paper outlines the developments of the Nordic crises, reasons behind them and crisis management by the authorities. Relatively more emphasis is placed on the Finnish crisis, as it was the deepest one. The paper concludes by considering the lessons that can be drawn from the Nordic crises.

We examine the connective architecture of the main Colombian payment and settlement systems in order to update what we know about local financial networks, and to elaborate on the main consequences for financial stability. Evidence suggests that local financial networks display a modular (i.e. clustered) scale-free (i.e. inhomogeneous) architecture. Results concur with other real-world networks, and propose new insights and challenges for authorities contributing to financial stability. For instance, (i) traditional reductionist assumptions for modeling financial systems (e.g. homogeneity) may be particularly misleading; (ii) the observed modular scale-free architecture favors robustness and resilience; (iii) the generating process of such architecture overlaps with literature on trading relationships; (iv) carelessly reducing inhomogeneity in financial systems may backfire in the form of a less robust and less resilient financial system; and (v) financial authorities should understand and take advantage of the existing architecture by means of designing and implementing macro-prudential regulation and system-calibrated requirements.

We model the expected support of banks with credit ratings from Moody's and Fitch, taking explicitly into account the capacity and willingness of governments to provide support in case of need, as well as their concerns about moral hazard (i.e., that the expected support may induce banks to assume bigger risks). Our results suggest that moral hazard concerns are relatively weak. In addition, a substantial part of the expected support can be attributed to the quality of a country's institutions. These findings have important implications for the dynamics of banking crises, the value of the ‘fair’ insurance premium banks might be called upon to pay for the expected support, as well as for ways to reduce the resulting negative externalities.

This paper studies the impact of the subprime crisis on the ratings issued by the rating agencies in evaluating the solvency of banks. After ascertaining a significant worsening of ratings after the crisis, the paper hypothesises the possibility that this worsening is due not exclusively to a deterioration in the banks’ credit quality, but also to a change in the behaviour of the rating agencies. The study designs a methodology to separate the observed change in ratings into two multiplicative components: one associated with the deterioration of the banks’ solvency itself and another associated with the change in the agencies’ valuation criteria. The methodology is applied to the Spanish Banking System during the period 2000–2009. The results obtained show that the observed lowering of ratings (10.88%) is explained (75%) by the deterioration in the solvency of the banks, but also (25%) by the hardening of the valuation criteria adopted by the agencies. This shows the procyclical character of ratings.

This paper analyses contingent-claims based measures of distance to default (D2D) for the 41 largest global banking institutions over the period 2006H2 to 20011H2. D2D falls from end-2006 through to end-2008. Cross-sectional differences in D2D prior to the crisis do not predict either bank failure or bank share prices decline, but D2D measured in mid-2008 does have some predictive value for failure by end-year. The ‘option value’ of the bank safety net remains small except at the height of the crisis and there is little indication of bank shareholders consciously using the safety net to shift risk onto taxpayers.

The recent financial crisis has clearly shown that the relationship between bank internationalization and risk is complex. Multinational banks can benefit from portfolio diversification, reducing their overall riskiness, but this effect can be offset by incentives going in the opposite direction, leading them to take on excessive risks. Since both effects are grounded on solid theoretical arguments, the answer of what is the actual relationship between bank internationalization and risk is left to the empirical analysis. In this paper, we study such relationship in the period leading to the financial crisis of 2007–2008. For a sample of 384 listed banks from 56 countries, we calculate two measures of risk for the period from 2001 to 2007 – the expected default frequency (EDF), a market-based and forward-looking indicator, and the Z-score, a balance-sheet-based and backward-looking measure – and relate them to the degree of banks’ internationalization. We find robust evidence that international diversification increases bank risk.