Knowledge that Transforms

Enforcement actions (sanctions) aim to penalize guilty companies and provide examples to other companies that bad behavior will be penalized. A handful of papers analyze the consequences of sanctions in banking for sanctioned companies, while no papers have investigated the spillover effects on non-sanctioned banks. Focusing on credit-related sanctions, we show the existence of a spillover effect: non-sanctioned banks behave similar to sanctioned banks, depending on their degree of similarity, offloading problematic loans and reducing their lending activity.

This study investigates whether Information Technology (IT) reputation, captured by the accumulation of consistent IT capability signals, influences bank loan contracting even though banks have access to inside information. We predict that IT reputation is associated with better loan terms because it lowers credit risk via its impact on default and information risks. Results based on 4,218 loan facility-years reveal, as predicted, that firms with a reputation for IT capability tend to have more favorable price and non-price terms for loan contracts and are less likely to have their credit rating downgraded or to report internal control weaknesses than firms with no IT reputation. The study contributes to the banking and IT business value literature by showing that banks incorporate borrowers' nonfinancial characteristics, such as IT reputation, into loan contracting terms. JEL Classifications: G21; G32; M41; O32. Data Availability: All data are available from sources identified in the study.

We examine the impact of rivals’ competitive activities on firms’ quantity-of-capital constraints in 60 countries. Prior work shows that competition increases the costs of debt and equity, which reduce the economic profit from investment. Capital constraints, however, may prevent firms from exploiting all positive NPV projects. Using unique survey data and several econometric techniques, we address endogeneity problems that affect both capital constraints and rivals’ competitive activities. We find that rivals’ competitive activities are positively associated with firms’ capital constraints and are more strongly correlated with capital constraints than banking sector competition. We also show that quantity-of-capital constraints are negatively related to firm growth, incremental to the cost of capital.

We develop a network representation-based methodology to aid an exploratory analysis of temporally evolving comovement in asset prices. This parsimonious order-n representation of the most significant comovement in asset prices, filtered by common factors, allows tackling a large number of assets and unraveling their complex comovement structure. Flexibility in choosing explanatory factors to suit the specific objectives of a study makes this methodology useful for portfolio analysis, risk parity approaches, and risk management decisions. We illustrate the features of the methodology for a set of major industry equity indices and to blue chip stocks, where we analyze the dynamic relevance of Fama–French factors. Investigating the network for more than 20 years, including the dot-com bust, global financial crisis, and European debt crisis, helps draw many insights. For instance, unexpected industries are seen to connect idiosyncratically through the dot-com bust. We demonstrate that a network factor model based portfolio allocation performs better than a regular factor model based allocation.

This paper formalizes the effects of liberalization across the border of deposit-taking and lending activities on the regime of competition in the banking market and on the rate of growth of the economy. We extend two economy based Deidda (2006)’s banking model in which originally each economy hosts at least one operating bank. We introduce two GATS-defined modes of commercial banking liberalization – namely the Commercial Presence mode and the Cross-Border mode. Additionally, we introduce the possibility of strategic behavior by competing banks in equilibrium. The extended model provides a causal link between the cost structure of the banking industry, the regime of competition in the liberalized banking sector and the rate of growth of the economy under alternative modes of liberalization. In particular, we show a threshold effect in terms of economic development: above certain economic development the banking sector operates competitively and supports an accelerating rate of growth, generating a bidirectional, self-reinforcing link between commercial banking liberalization and growth. The pace of growth is further increased, with respect to a scenario where such behavior is not present, by the presence of strategic behavior by competing banks in equilibrium.

We use a novel dataset to estimate, for the first time in the literature, the effects of Ponzi schemes on the formal financial sector. DMG and DRFE, two Ponzi schemes that were shut down by the Colombian government in November 2008, had over half a million customers, who invested funds corresponding to 1.2% of Colombia's annual GDP. We find that pyramid costumers’ obtained more loans from the financial sector and their credit standings were better than those in the respective control groups while the schemes were operating. Afterwards, their loan stocks started to decrease and their ratings with the banking sector deteriorated. Prior to November 2008, deposits in the financial sector fell more in the municipalities more affected by the schemes.

The sovereign debt crisis in the euro area saw credit spreads on sovereign bonds and credit default swaps (CDS) surge for a number of member states. The rise in sovereign yields was accompanied by a significant increase in sovereign CDS market activity. This pattern raised concerns that destabilising speculation via outright short-selling of CDS (so-called ‘naked CDS’) was behind the increase in bond yields. In response, policy-makers introduced a ban on naked CDS trading. We investigate the effect of the ban on the price discovery process of sovereign credit risk, contrasting results for the post-ban period with those obtained prior to the ban. We use intraday data on sovereign CDS and bonds across a number of euro area countries. Our first main finding is that the CDS market dominates the bond market in terms of price discovery. That is, CDS premia in most cases adjust quicker to reflect new information than bond spreads. This result holds also when taking into account transaction costs. Our second main finding is that the ban on short-selling did not alter price discovery dynamics or reduce the efficiency of the market. Finally, we find that prior to the ban, CDS spreads were persistently higher than bond credit spreads, even after controlling for transaction costs. This points to the presence of market frictions that limit the ability of arbitrage forces to fully close pricing gaps between the two markets. However, these pricing discrepancies were in many cases largely eliminated following the introduction of the ban.

I extract a latent systematic risk factor, which is orthogonal to idiosyncratic risk and observable systematic risk, from credit spreads for 1764 Eurobonds across euro area non-financial firms over the 1999–2015 period. The extracted common latent factor negatively predicts stock market excess returns, the growth rate in real economic activity and economic sentiment. It predicts the financial crisis and the two economic recessions.

This paper examines whether the trading activity of different investor types, institutional versus retail, can affect the relation between beta and average returns. We find that the beta-return relation is strong and positive on days with high institutional trading activity, and negative and significant on low institutional trading days. Our findings are robust and not driven by recently documented effects such as macroeconomic news and leverage constraints, among others. The evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that the preferences and characteristics of various investor types, which are revealed through their trading activity, cause the slope of the Security Market Line to change.

This paper offers evidence on the effect of ECB's conventional and unconventional monetary policy on economic expectations in Euro-area countries during the US and EU crisis. We employ a range of research methodologies in a sample of nine Eurozone countries and combine expectations/sentiment indicators with a set of macroeconomic and financial variables. We find that ECB's conventional monetary policy (and Fed's monetary policy stance) has a positive and significant effect on economic expectations for Core Eurozone countries and a weak effect on Peripheral Eurozone countries. ECB's unconventional policy measures, however, have a negative short term effect on Core countries’ economic expectations. This result is robust to different methodologies (PVAR, QVAR, FAVAR) and different datasets. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of monetary policy in the determination of economic expectations.