Knowledge that Transforms

We study the effects of both tighter and looser bank capital requirements on bank risk-taking. We exploit credit register data matched with firm and bank level data in conjunction with changes in capital requirements stemming from Basel III, including the introduction of a SME supporting bank capital factor in the European Union. We find that tighter capital requirements reduce the supply of bank credit to firms, while looser capital requirements mitigate the credit supply effects of increasing capital. Importantly, at the loan level (credit supply), banks more affected by capital requirements change less the supply of credit to riskier than to safer firms, and these asymmetric effects occur for both the tightening and the loosening of bank capital requirements. Finally, these effects are also important at the firm-level for total credit availability and for firm survival. Interestingly, our results suggest that those banks most impacted by the tighter Basel III capital requirements prioritize credit among ex-ante riskier firms to avoid their closure, consistent with loan evergreening.

We investigate whether banks’ initial responses during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in supporting their customers, communities, and governments were perceived as value-enhancing by investors. Using a unique responsible banking measure for a sample of the largest US and European commercial banks, we find a negative relationship between responsible bank behavior and stock market performance, particularly in the first wave of the pandemic. We also find that riskier banks were affected more negatively if they behaved responsibly. Overall, our findings show that banks’ responsible behavior during a crisis reduces, or at best is not relevant to, shareholder value.

We examine how the repo market operates during liquidity stress by applying network analysis to novel transaction-level data of the overnight gilt repo market including the COVID-19 crisis. We find that during this crisis the repo network becomes more connected, with most institutions relying on previously used counterparties. There are however important changes in the repo volumes and spreads during the stress relative to normal times. There is a significant increase in volumes traded with the central counterparties (CCPs) sector. At the same time non-banks, except hedge funds, decrease borrowing and face higher spreads in the bilateral segment. Overall, this evidence reflects a preference for dealers and banks to transact in the centrally cleared rather than the bilateral segment. Our results can inform the policy debate around the behaviour of banks and non-banks in recent liquidity stress and on widening participation in CCPs by non-banks.

Relying on theories in which bank create private money by making loans that create deposits—a process we call “funding liquidity creation”—we measure how much funding liquidity the U.S. banking system creates. Private money creation by banks enables lending to not be constrained by the supply of cash deposits. During the 2001–2020 period, 92 percent of bank deposits were due to funding liquidity creation, and during 2011–2020 funding liquidity creation averaged $10.7 trillion per year, or 57 percent of GDP. Using natural disasters data, we provide causal evidence that better-capitalized banks create more funding liquidity and lend more even during times when cash deposit balances are falling or unchanged. Large banks as well as the top banks in Federal Reserve districts create more liquidity.

We investigate the time variation in credit rating standards awarded to financial institutions of commercial bank credit ratings awarded by the three principal CRAs from 1990 to 2015 in a world-wide context by testing for well-defined structural shifts. We focus on the part of the ratings that cannot be accounted using publicly available information. We test whether major financial events are conditioning, ex-post such changes Distinctively in this paper’s timespan our analysis covers four periods: (i) before and (ii) after the 2001–2 corporate collapses, followed by (iii) before the global financial crisis and (iv) after the global financial crisis. We find substantial differences in the assignment of bank credit ratings among the three major agencies, Moody’s, Fitch, and S&P. Agencies differ both in terms of re-adjustment of ratings but also on the speed of response to the evens. All three agencies tightened ratings during the 2008 crisis and kept reducing them in its aftermath.

In this paper, we investigate price exuberance episodes in the main UK commercial real estate sectors – retail, offices and industrials - over the period December 1986–April 2022. Using the Backward Supremum Augmented Dickey Fuller approach of Phillips et al. (2015a,b), we find that episodes of price explosiveness are asynchronous across sectors with only common phase being the period 2003–2007. We also conduct a multivariate probit analysis to identify factors that indicate the occurrence of price exuberance episodes and generate early signals for possible price bubble building. The predictors for price explosiveness differ by sector with more consistent signals obtained from the yield curve for retail and industrials, rent growth for offices and industrials, and inflation for retail and offices. A key implication of this study is that the study of price exuberance and bubbles in private real estate should be sector specific even within the same country.

Most of the foreign exchange intervention literature overlooks the influence of market uncertainty when evaluating effectiveness. In this paper we take a fresh new look at how this uncertainty amplifies exchange rate effects. Our contribution is twofold. We first posit a partial equilibrium model with frictions to illustrate that when uncertainty is low, intervention is less effective, for agents are willing to bet against the central bank. Conversely, when uncertainty is high, intervention faces a weaker countervailing force from speculators and arbitragers. Second, we empirically test for the incremental effects of flimsy exchange rate fundamentals by using a sharp policy discontinuity in the way the Central Bank of Colombia intervened in the FX market. Our results indicate that market uncertainty increases depreciation of domestic currency in approximately 2 percentage points (pp) following central bank purchases of foreign currency and extends its duration in up to 4 weeks. Additionally, these purchases have an incremental effect in curbing exchange rate volatility in close to 5 pp.

Strategic alliances are voluntary corporate arrangements for mutual benefit. Although alliances are common as an alternative to M&As, they require cooperation between alliance partners who continue to operate as independent companies. Thus, relational risk—the probability and consequences of unsatisfactory cooperation or opportunistic behavior—is inherent in alliances and a major determinant of alliance success. In this paper, we examine and find that alliance announcement CARs are higher for companies sharing the same auditor with their alliance partner. Further, our findings suggest that the shared auditor effect is stronger for alliances where potential relational risk between alliance partners is greater. Our findings hold when we use “withdrawn” (i.e., the withdrawal of an announced alliance before its start date) as an alternative, albeit inverse, measure of alliance success. Collectively, we provide novel evidence which suggests that auditors add shareholder value by playing a matchmaking role in alliance formation, building inter-company trust and mitigating relational risk by facilitating the sharing of non-financial information between potential alliance partners among their audit clients.

This paper empirically analyses whether post-global financial crisis regulatory reforms have created appropriate incentives to voluntarily centrally clear over-the-counter (OTC) derivative contracts. We use confidential European trade repository data on single-name sovereign credit default swap (CDS) transactions and show that both seller and buyer manage counterparty exposures and capital costs, strategically choosing to clear when the counterparty is riskier. The clearing incentives seem particularly responsive to seller credit risk, which is in line with the notion that counterparty credit risk (CCR) is asymmetric in CDS contracts. The riskiness of the underlying reference entity also impacts the decision to clear as it affects both CCR capital charges for OTC contracts and central counterparty clearing house (CCP) margins for cleared contracts. Lastly, we find evidence that when a transaction helps netting positions with the CCP and hence lower margins, the likelihood of clearing is higher.

Using unique data from a leading peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform, we investigate the link between past investment performance and choice of auto-investing tool. Our results suggest that investors who experience fewer defaults in the manual mode are more inclined to switch to automatic investment. Several factors account for this relationship, including investor inattention, decision speed, investment delegation, and experience. Regarding the latter, our results suggest that experienced investors are more likely to continue self-directed bidding, even if they have faced defaults in manual investments in the past. These investors may attribute their previous mistakes to their own actions rather than the limitations of the self-directed bids. Our results are robust to alternative specifications.