This paper studies the role of securitization in bank management. I propose a new index of “bank loan portfolio liquidity” which can be thought of as a weighted average of the potential to securitize loans of a given type, where the weights reflect the composition of a bank loan portfolio. I use this new index to show that by allowing banks to convert illiquid loans into liquid funds, securitization reduces banks' holdings of liquid securities and increases their lending ability. Furthermore, securitization provides banks with an additional source of funding and makes bank lending less sensitive to cost of funds shocks. By extension, the securitization weakens the ability of the monetary authority to affect banks' lending activity but makes banks more susceptible to liquidity and funding crisis when the securitization market is shut down

Banks increasingly use short-term wholesale funds to supplement traditional retail deposits. Existing literature mainly points to the “bright side” of wholesale funding: sophisticated financiers can monitor banks, disciplining bad but refinancing good ones. This paper models a “dark side” of wholesale funding. In an environment with a costless but noisy public signal on bank project quality, short-term wholesale financiers have lower incentives to conduct costly monitoring, and instead may withdraw based on negative public signals, triggering inefficient liquidations. Comparative statics suggest that such distortions of incentives are smaller when public signals are less relevant and project liquidation costs are higher, e.g., when banks hold mostly relationship-based small business loans

[What is the effect of financial crises and their resolution on banks' choice of liquidity? When banks have relative expertise in employing risky assets, the market for these assets clears only at fire-sale prices following a large number of bank failures. The gains from acquiring assets at fire-sale prices make it attractive for banks to hold liquid assets. The resulting choice of bank liquidity is countercyclical, inefficiently low during economic booms but excessively high during crises. We present evidence consistent with these predictions. While interventions to resolve banking crises may be desirable ex post, they affect bank liquidity in subtle ways: Liquidity support to failed banks or unconditional support to surviving banks reduces incentives to hold liquidity, whereas support to surviving banks conditional on their liquid asset holdings has the opposite effect

What is the effect of financial crises and their resolution on banks' choice of liquidity? When banks have relative expertise in employing risky assets, the market for these assets clears only at fire-sale prices following a large number of bank failures. The gains from acquiring assets at fire-sale prices make it attractive for banks to hold liquid assets. The resulting choice of bank liquidity is countercyclical, inefficiently low during economic booms but excessively high during crises. We present evidence consistent with these predictions. While interventions to resolve banking crises may be desirable ex post, they affect bank liquidity in subtle ways: Liquidity support to failed banks or unconditional support to surviving banks reduces incentives to hold liquidity, whereas support to surviving banks conditional on their liquid asset holdings has the opposite effect. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press

[A lesson of the recent financial crisis is that the interbank market is crucial for banks facing uncertainty regarding their liquidity needs. This article studies the efficiency of the interbank market in allocating funds. We show that the central bank should lower the interbank rate when confronted with a crisis that causes a disparity in the liquidity held among banks. This suggests that the traditional tenet prescribing the separation between prudential regulation and monetary policy should be abandoned. We also show that failure to cut interest rates during a crisis erodes financial stability by increasing the risk of bank runs

A lesson of the recent financial crisis is that the interbank market is crucial for banks facing uncertainty regarding their liquidity needs. This article studies the efficiency of the interbank market in allocating funds. We show that the central bank should lower the interbank rate when confronted with a crisis that causes a disparity in the liquidity held among banks. This suggests that the traditional tenet prescribing the separation between prudential regulation and monetary policy should be abandoned. We also show that failure to cut interest rates during a crisis erodes financial stability by increasing the risk of bank runs

This paper investigates whether the benefits of bank–borrower relationships differ depending on three factors identified in the theoretical literature: verifiability of information, bank size and complexity, and bank competition. We extend the current literature by analyzing how relationship lending affects loan contract terms and credit availability in an empirical model that simultaneously accounts for all three of these factors. Based on Japanese survey data we find evidence that the benefits from stronger bank–borrower relationships in terms of credit availability are limited to smaller banks. However, when the benefits are measured as improved credit terms, we find little additional benefit, and in some cases increased cost, from stronger relationships for opaque borrowers and for borrowers who get funding from small banks. These latter findings suggest the possibility that relationship borrowers may suffer from capture effects

Using trended Brownian motion to characterize borrower cash needs over time, we are able to derive a probability density function for the time to depletion of a bank credit line as well as the likelihoods for the time to exhausting the sources of liquidity that fund the loan. Armed with these analytic results, we solve for the credit line mark-up rate and the configuration of stored liquidity that maximizes the bank’s intertemporal expected profits from the loan. The optimality conditions produce a system of integral differential equations whose solutions we then simulate over a host of scenarios

We study the prices that individual banks pay for liquidity (captured by borrowing rates in repos with the central bank and benchmarked by the overnight index swap) as a function of market conditions and bank characteristics. These prices depend in particular on the distribution of liquidity across banks, which is calculated over time using individual bank-level data on reserve requirements and actual holdings. Banks pay more for liquidity when positions are more imbalanced across banks, consistent with the existence of short squeezing. We also show that small banks pay more for liquidity and are more vulnerable to squeezes. Healthier banks pay less but, contrary to what one might expect, banks in formal liquidity networks do not. State guarantees reduce the price of liquidity but do not protect against squeezes

This paper examines how banking competition affects the transmission of monetary policy through the bank lending channel. We apply a two-step estimation procedure using bank-level panel data for commercial banks in 10 Asian and 10 Latin American countries during the period from 1996 to 2006. In the first step we measure the degree of banking competition by applying the methodology proposed by Panzar and Rosse (1987). In the second step we estimate a loan growth equation where the explanatory variables include the Panzar–Rosse measure of banking competition. The estimation results provide consistent evidence that increased competition in the banking sector weakens the transmission of monetary policy through the bank lending channel. This is especially true for banks in Latin American countries and banks of small size, low liquidity, and low capitalization. We also discuss the policy implications of the main findings of this paper