Knowledge that Transforms

We analyze the effects on bank valuation of government policies aimed at shoring up banks’ financial conditions during the 2008–2009 financial crisis. Governments injected into troubled institutions massive amounts of fresh capital and/or guaranteed bank assets and liabilities. We employ event study methodology to estimate the impact of government-intervention announcements on bank valuation. Using traditional approaches, announcements directed at the banking system as a whole were associated with positive cumulative abnormal returns, whereas announcements directed at specific banks with negative ones. Findings are consistent with the hypothesis that individual institutions were reluctant to seek public assistance. However, when we correct standard errors for bank-and-time effects, virtually all announcement impacts vanish in Europe, whereas they weaken in the United States. The policy implication is that the large public commitments were either not credible or deemed inadequate relative to the underlying financial difficulties of banks.

We test how the use of financial derivatives affects banks’ informational structure and future stock performance based on a sample of large bank holding companies in the US. Using banks’ use of financial derivatives as a proxy for opacity, we find that high level use of interest rate and foreign exchange derivatives are associated with an increase in the synchronicity (R2) of stock price movements with the market index, which indicates less revelation of bank-specific information to the market. This finding is consistent with the prediction of the model developed by Wagner (2007). We document that superior corporate governance tempers these effects. Finally, we find that an increase in the opacity is significantly and positively related to an increase in banks’ future stock price crash risk.

We present a macro variable-based empirical model for corporate bank loans’ credit risk. The model captures the well-known positive relationship between probability of default (PD) and loss given default (LGD; i.e., the inverse of recovery) and their counter-cyclical movement with the business cycle. In the absence of proper micro data on LGD, we use a random-sampling method to estimate the annual average LGD. We specify a two equation model for PD and LGD which is estimated with Finnish time-series data from 1989 to 2008. We also use a system of time-series models for the exogenous macro variables to derive the main macroeconomic shocks which are then used in stress testing aggregate loan losses. We show that the endogenous LGD makes a considerable difference in stress tests compared to a constant LGD assumption.

The potential for banks to arbitrage between regulators exists both in the US, with its multiple federal banking regulators, and in Europe, due to multinational banking. This paper models multiple regulators that have an agency bias, which can give rise to a “race to the bottom”. The model is used to analyze the interaction between the regulatory equilibrium and several salient pre-crisis features: rising bank leverage; wholesale funding with asymmetric information; and increasing supervisional costs to disentangling bank asset exposures. Each of these raises bank risk taking on its own, but regulatory competition is shown to be an amplification mechanism.

Before 2007, financial crises were not widely studied in economics and finance. The lack of importance ascribed to financial stability and our limited knowledge of this topic were significant contributors to the crisis. This paper suggests five areas where new theories are needed. These are asset price bubbles, central bank checks and balances, global imbalances, banking regulation, and competition in financial services.

We model the reorganization decision of distressed firms. One of the novel features of our paper is that we examine the asset and liability side restructuring decisions jointly to resolve financial distress. Secondly, we model several institutional features of coping with financial distress such as debtor-in-possession financing, prepackaged bankruptcies, and asset sales. In our model, asset liquidity, indirect costs of financial distress, and the option value of equity are the determinants of the choice between Chapter 11 reorganizations and workouts. The model develops several testable predictions, some of which are novel and others of which are able to explain previously documented empirical results.

The financial crisis showed, once again, that neglecting real estate booms can have disastrous consequences. In this paper, we spell out the circumstances under which a more active policy agenda on this front would be justified. Then, we offer insights on the pros and cons as well as implementation challenges of various policy tools that can be used to contain the damage to the financial system and the economy from real estate boom–bust episodes. These insights derive from econometric analysis, when possible, and case studies of country experiences. Broadly, booms financed through credit and involving leverage are more likely to warrant a policy response. In that context, macroprudential measures can be targeted more precisely to specific sources of risk, but they may prove ineffective because of circumvention. In that case, monetary policy may have to be used to lean against the wind.

This study constructs a financial stress index for Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Russia and examines the relationship between financial stress and economic activity. The financial stress index incorporates banking sector fragility, time varying stock market return volatility, sovereign debt spreads, an exchange market pressure index, and trade credit. These variables seem to capture key aspects of financial stress in sample countries as the index peaks at known financial crises in these countries. We then examine the relationship between financial stress and economic activity. Impulse response functions based on bivariate VARs show a significant relationship between financial stress and some measures of economic activity. Overall, the constructed financial stress index provides valuable information on the state of the economy and economic activity.

We analyze the global banking network using data on cross-border banking flows for 184 countries during 1978–2010. We find that the density of the global banking network defined by these flows is pro-cyclical, expanding and contracting with the global cycle of capital flows. We also find that country connectedness in the network tends to rise before banking and debt crises and to fall in their aftermath. Despite a historically unique build-up in aggregate flows prior to the global financial crisis, network density in 2007 was comparable to earlier peaks. This suggests that factors other than connectedness, such as the location of the initial shock to the core of the network, have contributed to the severity of the crisis. The global financial crisis stands out as an unusually large perturbation to the global banking network, with indicators of network density in 2008 reaching all-time lows.

We analyze a sample of large international banks in major advanced economies and examine the impact that bank-specific factors have on an institution's solvency risk and its contribution to systemic risk. We focus on the five categories that the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has recently proposed as indicators of systemic importance. Our findings suggest that unstable funding is the main factor driving systemic risk. Furthermore, the combination of significant trading activities with global presence appears to exacerbate spillover risks to the global financial system. Interestingly, whereas trading activities contribute to the build-up of correlated or ‘wrong-way’ risk they help to mitigate individual solvency risk. Conversely, a decentralized approach to liquidity management seems to alleviate individual solvency risk but amplifies the transmission of financial distress across the financial system. This suggests that a macro-prudential approach to financial regulation should focus not only on scaling up micro-prudential measures but also on enabling the efficient transfer of risk between financial institutions.