Knowledge that Transforms

Existing research generally finds that the magnitude of the effect of supervisory rating shocks on real economic activity is small and short-lived. This finding is puzzling because downgrades, especially substantial ones, often include lending restrictions and thus would be expected to have a strong effect on real activity. We use the local projections approach to investigate whether this anomaly can be explained by nonlinearities or asymmetric effects; our empirical results indicate that they are indeed present. In particular, we find that the effects are asymmetric: bank downgrades lead to a pronounced decline in real activity, while upgrades do not result in its increase. Furthermore, we document the presence of nonlinear effects for the downgrade—but not upgrade—shocks, as their impact increases disproportionately with its size.

This study presents a novel way to measure changes in commercial banks’ credit risk based on higher-order moments of the interest rate distribution. These measures are employed as control variables to investigate the pass-through of changes in the monetary policy rates (MPR) to retail banks’ lending rates to firms. Applying a multivariate framework it is shown that the introduced credit risk measures are statistically significant and have the expected signs. In this context, the pass-through is symmetric and complete in the short run. No evidence indicates that expectations of MPR changes matter for banks’ lending rates in Chile and robustness analyses indicate that neither do macroeconomic factors. The results suggest that credit risk should be taken into account when evaluating changes in banks’ lending rates and higher-order moments of the interest rate distribution are suitable for measuring changes in this risk.

We study a structural model of individual bank defaults across the banking sector; banks are interconnected through their exposure to a common risk factor. The paper introduces a systemic risk measure based on the default frequency in the banking sector; this measure depends non-linearly on the factor's loadings, in contrast to previous systemic risk measures that depend linearly on loadings. We estimate loadings in the U.S. banking system over the course of the last 36 years; we find that they have considerably increased over time and identify four major regimes. Our measure shows that systemic risk became critical in the last of our four regimes, covering the most recent time period from 05/2007 to 09/2016. The empirical findings highlight that our measure complements existing systemic risk measures.

We examine the lending patterns in the Turkish Islamic banking over business cycles. We find that, similar to conventional banks, Islamic banks in Turkey exhibit procyclical lending pattern. We also find that Islamic bank lending does not show significant difference from conventional bank lending. The results conflict with some of the findings that indicate Islamic banks as natural stabilizers in the banking systems. We emphasize that regulatory amendments of the last decade that are effective on Islamic banks could induce these banks to lend procyclically. To test the validity of this conjecture, we empirically examine how the state of competition in the Turkish banking system affects bank lending across business cycles by disentangling the effects separately for Islamic and conventional banks. The results suggest that the degree of competition spur bank lending procyclicality at the same magnitude, confirming the convergence between Islamic and conventional banks in their lending patterns. We also discuss several other issues in Islamic banking which may lead to the procyclicality of lending.

Using international listed banks from the United States, Europe, Japan and China from 2004 to 2014, we analyze the effect on banks’ risk of some of the most relevant new elements of the prudential regulatory framework proposed after the Financial Crisis. We measure risk by a market measure, the volatility of banks’ stock returns. We also examine the effect of government support during the financial crisis and designation as a G-SIB. We find little support for an association with government support and none for a negative relationship. We find support for a positive effect of designation as a G-SIB on risk. We find a positive association with securities trading and a negative association with capital. Banks´ chosen liquidity is unimportant for this measure of risk.

This paper investigates the impact of the integration of traditional and nontraditional banking activities on loan portfolio management at the consolidated level. The increased risk exposure to nontraditional banking assets, e.g., trading and merchant banking assets, has a nontrivial impact on traditional loan portfolios and, in particular, on the supply of short-term credits. The findings show that confronted with the market-wide shock of the financial crisis, commercial-focused banks which hold larger amounts of risky nontraditional banking assets gravitate their loan portfolios away from business and consumer loan sectors. The results from a quasi-natural experiment reveal that in response to an exogenous regulatory shock of FAS No. 166 and 167, which required banks to transfer off-balance sheet securitized loans onto bank balance sheets, securitizer banks tend to reduce business credits substantially more due to their pre-existing exposures to nontraditional assets.

A typical argument in the literature is that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reduces the risk of conflicts with stakeholders. In accordance to this, we test whether: (i) domain specific CSR portfolios present pricing anomalies that could be captured by the introduction of risk factors accounting for exposition to stakeholder risk, (ii) this risk source is priced in the cross-section of stock returns. In doing so we are particularly cautious in disentangling the contributions of different CSR domains in generating the pricing anomalies. Our findings show the existence of pricing anomalies related to CSR, which vary in numbers across all the domains under analysis. Even if our domain-specific CSR risk factors are not able to capture all pricing anomalies, we find that they reduce their absolute value. Additionally, our results show that the stakeholder risk is priced in the cross-section of returns, and that such additional risk source presents different premiums for each domain.

This paper studies how the Greek sovereign credit event in March 2012 impacted the credit default swap (CDS) market from market-wide and investor behaviour perspectives, using both network tools to a dataset of snapshots of the global bilateral CDS exposures and a panel analysis on CDS spreads. Regarding the CDS spreads, we find very little discernible direct impact of the Greek credit event on CDS spreads overall. This finding provides some further evidence that the Greek credit event was well anticipated by most market participants. However, we find several significant changes in the Greek CDS network structure following the credit event: the number of connections via exposures declined significantly, the directionality of the positions (net long vs net short) of the main groups of market participants reversed, while none of the non-banks returned to trade Greek CDSs until the last observation of dataset (October 2014). Regarding indirect effects to other CDS markets, we find evidence of temporary spill-over effects on CDS reference entities with credit risk associated with the risk of the Greek sovereign. In particular, the market and counterparty structures changed temporarily with all types of traders decreasing their exposures to the EU periphery sovereign reference entities and also changing their trading counterparties, while after some time, the structure of the market returned to a similar one observed before the credit event. Finally, we find some support for the bank-sovereign nexus, as there was a consistent retreat from the CDS exposures on banks in the EU periphery countries, contrary to banks residing in the other EU countries.

This paper checks how international spillovers of shocks and policies are modified when banks are foreign owned. To this end we build a two-country macroeconomic model with banking sectors that are owned by residents of one (big and foreign) country. Consistently with empirical findings, in our model foreign ownership of banks amplifies spillovers from foreign shocks. It also strengthens the international transmission of monetary and macroprudential policies . We next use the model to replicate the financial crisis in the euro area and show how, by preventing bank capital outflow in 2009, the Polish regulatory authorities managed to reduce its contagion to Poland. We also find that under foreign bank ownership such policy is strongly preferred to a recapitalization of domestic banks. Finally, we check how foreign ownership of banks affects transmission of domestic shocks to find that it has a stabilizing effect.

We show that business cycle dynamics and, in particular, the cyclicality of a firm’s growth opportunities, determine the value of corporate cash holdings. An additional dollar of cash is more valuable for firms with less procyclical expansion opportunities. This valuation effect is strongest for low leverage and high R&D firms, but is independent of their financial status. Corporate cash holdings provide the flexibility to invest for firms that have expansion opportunities during crisis times with business cycle downturns and supply-side financial constraints. Cash holdings in firms with less procyclical growth opportunities are associated with higher investment and better operating performance.