Knowledge that Transforms

The Term Auction Facility (TAF) was designed by the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis to inject emergency short-term funds into banks, as a supplement to the lender of last resort discount window offerings. We describe how the Federal Reserve altered the design of the Term Auction Facility (TAF) over the course of the financial crisis and examine the utilization of this stand-alone facility. Most specifically we detail the impact of the greatly increased offering amounts in all auctions after October 2008, which resulted in the facility no longer auctioning scarcely available funds. We also document significantly different usage of the facility by FDIC-insured community and non-community banks, consistent with the notion of a two-tiered banking system in the U.S. Community banks were far less likely to use the facility than larger, non-community banks.

The new rules on bank liquidity set by the Basel Committee require banks to hold high-quality liquid assets (HQLAs) against future cash outflows in periods of market stress. Domestic government bonds are considered to be HQLAs. To assess the appropriateness of this rule, we investigate the liquidity of European government bonds in ordinary times and in periods of market turmoil. We find that the effect of adverse market conditions on liquidity strongly depends on individual bond’s characteristics. Our evidence argues for rules on HQLAs that should constrain the eligibility of government bonds depending on their characteristics (primarily, duration and rating).

Many central banks have adopted explicit objectives for financial stability, raising the possibility of trade-offs between price and financial stability objectives. Based on structural vector autoregressions that incorporate both monetary and macroprudential policy shocks for four inflation targeting economies in Asia and the Pacific, we analyse the role of each policy shock in explaining deviations from the other policy’s objective, by applying historical decompositions. The macroprudential measures used in the study affect credit extended to the private sector. We find that there are periods when macroprudential policy shocks have contributed to pushing inflation away from the central bank’s inflation target and when monetary policy shocks have contributed to buoyant credit, suggesting that there have been short-term trade-offs between price and financial stability objectives. However, we also find periods when macroprudential policy shocks helped stabilise inflation and monetary policy shocks contributed to financial stability.

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 exploit a quasi-experimental setting in India to empirically demonstrate that non-discretionary allocation of book-building initial public offering (IPO) shares incentivizes institutional investors to understate the value of IPO shares in the primary market, so they can acquire shares at a lower price in the secondary market. Our IPO underpricing framework, which disentangles the effect of institutional investors’ incentive—associated with allocation policy, from the effect of underwriters’ risk—associated with underwriting contract, demonstrates that underpricing in book-building IPOs underwritten with firm-commitment contracts in India is higher in the post-September 2005 non-discretionary allocation investor protection period, than in the pre-September 2005 discretionary allocation period. Conversely, underpricing in fixed-price IPOs underwritten with firm-commitment contracts is lower in the post-September 2005 investor protection period than in the pre-September 2005 period. Overall, our findings, which are robust to endogneity concerns, reveal a policy tradeoff between information production and investor protection.

We investigate whether anticipation of adverse events (litigation about market timing and late trading) may trigger mutual-fund runs. We find that runs start as early as three months prior to litigation announcements. Pre-litigation runs accumulate to 31 basis points of the total net assets over a three-month window; post-litigation runs may last more than six months and accumulate to 1.25 percent over the first three-month window. Additionally, investors who run before litigation announcements earn significantly higher risk-adjusted and peer-adjusted returns than those who run after litigation. The difference in returns is particularly pronounced for funds holding illiquid assets. Finally, securities held by litigated fund families significantly underperform vis-á-vis other securities in terms of lower abnormal returns and liquidity. Our analysis suggests that a pro-rata ownership design is insufficient to prevent mutual-fund runs.

This paper examines the impact of political institutions on bank risk-taking behavior. Using an international sample of banks from 98 countries over the period 1998–2007, I document that sound political institutions stimulate higher bank risk-taking. This is consistent with the hypotheses that better political institutions increase banks’ risk by boosting the credit market competition from alternative sources of finance and generating the moral hazard problems due to the expectation of government bailouts in worst economic conditions. While it is contrary to the hypotheses that better political institutions decrease banks’ risk by lowering the government expropriation risk and the information asymmetries between banks and borrowers. The results are robust to a number of sensitivity tests, including alternative proxies of bank risk-taking and political institutions, cross-sectional bank- and country-level regressions, endogeneity concerns of political institutions, country income levels, explicit deposit insurance schemes and sample extension from 1998 to 2014. I also examine the interdependence between political and legal institutions and find that political and legal institutions complement each other to influence bank risk-taking behavior.

Ownership, governance, and institutional diversity among banks are a subject of public and regulatory concern. This paper addresses this issue by using a case study of Spain, where the retail banking market was split evenly between shareholder and stakeholder banks before the crisis. We examine how institutional diversity mattered in the accumulation of risk in the pre-crisis years, in the severity of losses caused by the crisis, and in the resilience to recover from the losses. The method of analysis consists in linking the risk position of the banks in the pre-crisis period and the losses arising during the crisis to the decisions of banks to migrate from business models based on deposit financing to models based on market-debt financing. We find that cajas migrated to more vulnerable business models following the strategy of the shareholder banks, but the losses in the crisis were much higher in the former than in the latter. The paper interprets this result as evidence that what matters the most about the ownership of banks is their resilience in bad times.

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.