Abstract This paper investigates the role of banking supervision in controlling bank risk. Banking supervision is measured in terms of enforcement outputs (i.e., on-site audits and sanctions). Our results show an inverted U-shaped relationship between on-site audits and bank risk, while the relationship between sanctions and risk appears to be linear and negative. We also consider the combined effect of effective supervision and banking regulation (in the form of capital and market discipline requirements) on bank risk. We find that effective supervision and market discipline requirements are important and complementary mechanisms in reducing bank fragility. This is in contrast to capital requirements, which prove to be rather futile in controlling bank risk, even when supplemented with a higher volume of on-site audits and sanctions.

Using global data on syndicated loans, we show that any negative effect of stronger creditor rights on loan spreads, as identified in the prior literature (Qian and Strahan, 2007; Bae and Goyal, 2009), disappears once we include a single country characteristic: country size. This finding is robust to several identification methods, both global samples and within-country changes in creditor rights, different panel spans, and hundreds of control variables. We identify that key origins of the effect of country size on loan pricing are ethnic fractionalization and within-country heterogeneity in economic preferences, which create country risk.

Standard banking theory suggests that there exists an optimal level of credit risk that yields maximum bank profit. We identify the optimal level of risk-weighted assets that maximizes banks’ returns in the full sample of US banks over the period 1996–2011. We find that this optimal level is cyclical for the average bank, being higher than the realized credit risk in relatively stable periods with high profit opportunities for banks but quickly decreasing below the realized in periods of turmoil. We place this cyclicality into the nexus between bank risk and monetary policy. We show that a contractionary monetary policy in stable periods, where the optimal credit risk is higher than the realized credit risk, increases the gap between them. An increase in this gap also comes as a result of an expansionary monetary policy in bad economic periods, where the realized risk is higher than the optimal risk.

Abstract Does market power of banks affect firm performance? To answer this question we examine 25,236 syndicated loan facilities granted between 2000 and 2010 by 296 banks to 9,029 US non-financial firms. Accounting for both observed and unobserved bank and firm heterogeneity, we find that firms that were recently poorly performing obtain loans from banks with more market power. However, in the year after loan origination market power positively affects firm performance, but only if it is not too high. Our estimates thus suggest that bank market power can facilitate access to credit by poorly performing firms, yet at the same time also boosts the performance of the firms that obtain credit.

Abstract This article provides cross-country evidence that variations in bank regulatory policies result in differences in income distribution. In particular, the overall liberalization of banking systems decreases income inequality significantly. However, this effect becomes insignificant for countries with low levels of economic and institutional development and for market-based economies. Among liberalization policies, credit and interest rate controls have the most significant negative effect on inequality. Privatizations and liberalization of international capital flows also decrease income inequality; the latter also increases the income share of the relatively poor. In contrast, liberalization of securities markets increases income inequality substantially.

We study an equilibrium risk and return model to explore the effects of the coronavirus crisis and associated skewness on the market price of risk. We derive the moment and equilibrium equations, specifying skewness price of risk as an additive component of the effect of variance on mean expected return. We estimate our model using the flexible skewed generalized error distribution, for which we derive the distribution of returns and the likelihood function. Using S&P 500 Index returns from January 1980 to mid-October 2020, our results show that the coronavirus crisis generated a deeply negative reaction in the skewness and total market price of risk, more negative even than the subprime and the October 1987 crises.

Abstract We suggest that forward guidance, via publicly committing the central bank to future actions and creating associated expectations, fundamentally affects bank lending decisions independently of other forms of monetary policy. To test this hypothesis, we build a forward guidance measure based on the language used in the Federal Open Market Committee meetings and match this measure with syndicated loans. Our results show that expansionary forward guidance decreases corporate loan spreads and that this effect is stronger for well-capitalized banks lending to riskier firms. Forward guidance also affects nonprice lending terms, such as covenants, performance pricing provisions, and the loan syndicate structure. Additionally, banks tend to initiate new lending relationships with lower spreads after forward guidance issuance.

This study investigates whether regulations have an independent effect on bank risk-taking or whether their effect is channeled through the market power possessed by banks. Given a well-established set of theoretical priors, the regulations considered are capital requirements, restrictions on bank activities and official supervisory power. We use data from the Central and Eastern European banking sectors over the period 1998–2005. The empirical results suggest that banks with market power tend to take on lower credit risk and have a lower probability of default. Capital requirements reduce risk in general, but for banks with market power this effect significantly weakens or can even be reversed. Higher activity restrictions in combination with more market power reduce both credit risk and the risk of default, while official supervisory power has only a direct impact on bank risk.

Does democratization reduce the cost of credit? Using global syndicated loan data from 1984 to 2014, we find that democratization has a sizable negative effect on loan spreads: a 1-point increase in the zero-to-ten Polity IV index of democracy shaves at least 19 basis points off spreads, but likely more. Reversals to autocracy hike spreads more strongly. Our findings are robust to the comprehensive inclusion of relevant controls, to the instrumentation with regional waves of democratization, and to a battery of other sensitivity tests. We thus highlight the lower cost of loans as one relevant mechanism through which democratization can affect economic development.

Corporate taxation can have redistributive effects on income and wealth. We hypothesize and empirically establish such an effect working via bank credit. We use a unique sample of small majority-owned firms that apply for credit, where only some firms (treated) experience a corporate tax cut. We show that after the decrease in corporate tax rates, the treated poorer business owners get easier access to credit. However, this policy also considerably increases loan amounts and decreases loan spreads for the treated richer. Ultimately, reducing the corporate tax rate predominantly increases the future income and wealth of richer business owners.