Knowledge that Transforms

In this short paper we briefly introduce some of the works presented during the conference “Network models and stress testing for financial stability” which was held in Mexico City hosted by Banco de Mexico on September 26-27, 2017. The papers ranged from new applications of network models for financial stability analysis to stress testing at central banks and common assets contagion. The novelty and originality of most of the works make this special issue a good read for the specialists in the Financial Stability field, including academics as well as practitioners and obviously financial authorities. We hope that you find this short introduction to the special issue and the special issue itself, interesting and useful for your everyday work.

We study the influence of policy uncertainty on the moral behavior of firms. When facing uncertainty, managers perceive various socioeconomic obstacles as more severe and disruptive to their business. Using data from policy uncertainty spouts in 93 countries, we document that some firms engage in norm-deviant behavior by cheating on taxes and paying more bribes. While private firms prefer to cheat on taxes, public firms choose bribery as a favorite tool to “grease the wheels” during periods of uncertainty. Strong social capital (local trust and religiosity) breaks this link between uncertainty and corruption.

This study disentangles a measure of implied skewness that is related to downward movements in the U.S. equity index from the corresponding implied skewness that is associated with upward movements. A positive SKEW index is constructed from S&P 500 call options, whereas a negative SKEW index is constructed from the S&P 500 put options. We show that the positive SKEW is linked to market sentiment, whereas the negative SKEW is related to existing tail risk measures. The negative SKEW is proposed as a more objective prudent tail risk measure, and it is found to be able to predict recessions, market downturns, and uncertainty indicators up to one year in advance. The predictive power of the negative SKEW is also confirmed when we control for other tail risk measures and also out-of-sample.

This paper investigates the effects of ownership patterns on banks’ cost and profit efficiencies taking a sample of 607 commercial banks operating in 53 African countries during the period 2005–2015. Using pooled and modified true fixed effects (TFE) stochastic frontier panel approaches, we obtain two principal results. First, foreign-owned banks are not more profit or cost efficient than their domestic peers. Second, privately owned banks outperform state-owned banks. These findings result not only from bank-level inefficiencies but are explained by bank-level characteristics and macroeconomic conditions. Specifically, larger, older, and listed banks are associated with higher profit efficiency. This study also reveals that ownership concentration (blockholding) has adverse effects on the efficiency of banks.

Using experimental data, we document that the impact of professional norms on the risk-taking of bank employees depends on their expectations of peers’ risk preferences. When the professional identity of bank employees is made salient, those who expect colleagues to take more risk than themselves increase risky investments by 5.2% points in a mock investment task, while others do not statistically change their risk-taking behaviors. Data from placebo experiments with non-bank employees do not exhibit such empirical patterns. The results are consistent with peer effects and social identity theories, and challenge the existing evidence that professional norms in the banking industry decrease risk-taking.

A successful low-carbon transition requires the introduction of policies aimed at aligning investments to the climate and sustainability targets. In this regard, a global Carbon Tax (CT) and a revision of the microprudential banking framework via a Green Supporting Factor (GSF) have been advocated but two main knowledge gaps remain. First, the understanding of the conditions under which the CT or the GSF could contribute to the scaling-up of new green investments or, in contrast, could introduce new sources of risk for macroeconomic and financial stability, is poor. Second, we don’t know how banks’ climatesentiments, i.e. their anticipation of climate policies’ impact in lending conditions, could affect the outcomes of the policies and of the low-carbon transition. To fill these knowledge gaps we develop a Stock-Flow Consistent model of a high income country that embeds an adaptive forecasting function of banks’ climate sentiments. Then, we assess the impact of the CT and GSF on the greening of the economy and on the banking sector analyzing the risk transmission channels from the credit market to the economy via loans contracts, and the reinforcing feedbacks that could give rise to cascading effects. Our results suggest that the GSF contributes to scale up green investments only in the short-run but it also introduces potential trade-offs on bank’s financial stability. To foster the low-carbon transition while preventing unintended effects on Non-Performing Loans and households’ budget, the introduction of the CT should be complemented with redistribution welfare policies. Finally, if banks revise their credit supply conditions based on the firms’ carbon profile ahead of climate policy introduction, they can contribute to align investments to the low-carbon transition and improve financial stability of the banking sector.

Using the Prudential Instruments Database (Cerutti et al., 2017b) and a unique confidential database on balance sheet items of euro area financial institutions, we analyse cross-border spillovers from prudential regulation for 248 banks from 16 euro-area countries over the period 2007Q3–2014Q4. We find that foreign branches increase lending following the tightening of sector-specific capital buffers, loan-to-value (LTV) limits or reserve requirements on deposits in local currencies in the countries where their parent banks reside. We also find that cross-border spillovers through lending of branches are stronger than through subsidiaries, possibly because it is easier for branches to reallocate lending across different jurisdictions, as they do not need to meet prudential requirements at a solo level. Finally, we find that also euro-area domestic banks increase lending, in particular to the real sector, when LTV limits are tightened abroad.

Despite the devastating worldwide human and economic tolls of the COVID-19 crisis, it has created some positive economic and financial surprises and opportunities for research. This paper highlights two such favorable surprises - the shortest U.S. recession on record and the avoidance of any banking crisis - and a number of research opportunities. The paper ties the "economic surprise" of the short recession to the speed and size of U.S. stimulus programs during COVID-19 - faster and larger than for the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). We connect the "financial surprise" of the resilient banking sector to prudential policies put in place during and after the GFC that fortified U.S. banks prior to COVID-19. These twin "surprises" are also mutually reinforcing - if either the economy or banking system had failed, so would the other. The paper also reviews extant COVID-19 banking research and suggest paths for future research. It recommends that particular attention be paid to research outside of the U.S. - where fewer favorable "surprises" may be present - as the best way to advance knowledge in this area.

This paper studies how the COVID-19 shock affects the CDS spread changes and abnormal stock returns of U.S. firms with different levels of debt rollover risk. We use the COVID-19 crisis as a quasi-natural experiment of adverse cash flow shock that increases the default risk of firms facing an immediate liquidity shortfall. We find that the COVID-19 shock significantly increased the CDS spread and decreased the shareholder value for firms facing higher debt rollover risk. The effect is stronger for non-financial firms, for firms that are financially constrained, and for firms that are highly volatile. Moreover, we find that firms with immediate refinancing needs suffered more than firms with distant refinancing needs during the COVID-19 shock, which further confirms that firms’ debt rollover risk is indeed a key factor that drives the heterogenous reactions to the shock. The paper provides fresh insights into the role of firms’ debt rollover risk during the COVID-19 health crisis.

We show that firms’ organization capital has a positive and economically important impact on innovation. Specifically, we find that firms with more organization capital have greater number of patents and receive more citations on their patents. The results are robust to alternative measures of organization capital and innovation, and endogeneity concerns. We also find that the ability to handle inherent difficulties associated with the innovation process and the reduction in managerial career concern threats are possible mechanisms through which organization capital affects firm innovation positively. These results provide strong evidence of the importance of a firm’s organization capital in their innovation process.