We document that a more generous unemployment insurance (UI) system shifts labor supply from safer to riskier firms and reduces the compensating wage differentials that risky firms need to pay. Consequently, a more generous UI system increases risky firms’ value and fosters entrepreneurship by reducing new firms’ labor costs. Exploiting a UI reform in Brazil that affects only part of the workforce allows us to compare labor supply for workers with different degrees of UI protection within the same firm, sharpening the identification of the results. Altogether, our results suggest that UI provides a transfer system from safe to risky firms.

This paper discusses a new approach to controlling for the environment when estimating efficiency. In response to the literature on the international comparison of bank efficiency, we draw the attention to a local dimension of comparison. By introducing geographical weights and estimating local frontiers for each US savings bank in the 2001–09 period, we find that the bank technical performance is higher for most banks in comparison to a fixed-effects approach. This result highlights the importance of taking into account the local environment and constraints while analyzing banks’ performance, so as not to consider the factors that are exogenous to these institutions as inefficiencies. Further analysis could improve the weighs calculation by employing other measures of interconnectedness besides geographical distance.

In light of the financial crisis, the practice of inflation targeting (IT) has been blamed for authorities’ failure to respond to the increase in financial systemic risk and to the development of asset bubbles. However, utilizing a rich database containing nearly 5500 commercial banks from 70 countries (among which, 22 are IT) for the period 1998–2012, this paper argues that on average, inflation targeting national banking systems (i) are more stable; (ii) possess sounder systemically important banks; and (iii) are less distressed than (or at least as distressed as) other banks during periods of global liquidity shortages. Our results are robust to a series of tests, such as when we compare countries with the same legal origins or control for the delegation of bank supervision responsibility to bodies other than the central bank. Overall, we conclude that IT cannot be blamed for contributing to financial fragility.

This paper addresses the issue on how bank size and market concentration affect performance and risks in 17 Latin American countries between 2001 and 2008. The objective is to evaluate whether a too-big-to-fail behavior has been present in the region. Surprisingly, we do not find evidence to support a higher fragility of large Latin American banks. Our results show that systemically important financial institutions appear to outperform others in terms of both cost and profit without the need of taking more risks. This result holds even in concentrated markets, i.e., where there are few dominant banks and many others with small size in relation to the market. A highly unequal banking market in terms of assets, however, is detrimental for the performance of smaller banks and it also decreases stability of the whole system. We conclude that regulators should deal with market concentration by reducing the size gap between large and small banks, instead of dealing specifically with systemically important banks.

This paper addresses the effects of bank competition on the risk-taking behaviors of banks in 10 Latin American countries between 2003 and 2008. We conduct our empirical approach in two steps. First, we estimate the Boone indicator, which is a measure of competition. We then regress this measure and other explanatory variables on the banking “stability inefficiency” derived simultaneously from the estimation of a stability stochastic frontier. Unlike previous findings, this paper concludes that competition affects risk-taking behavior in a non-linear way as both high and low competition levels enhance financial stability, while we find the opposite effect for average competition. In addition, bank size and capitalization are essential factors in explaining this relationship. On the one hand, the larger a bank is, the more it benefits from competition. On the other hand, a greater capital ratio is advantageous for banks that operate in collusive markets, while capitalization only enhances the stability of larger banks under high and average competition. These results are of extreme importance when considering bank regulations, especially in light of the recent turmoil in the global financial markets.

This paper tests whether diversification of the credit portfolio at the bank level leads to better performance and lower risk. We employ a new high frequency (monthly) panel data for the Brazilian banking system with information at the bank level for loans by economic sector. We find that loan portfolio concentration increases returns and also reduces default risk; the impact of concentration on bank’s return is decreasing on bank’s risk; there are significant size effects; foreign and state-owned banks seem to be less affected by the degree of diversification. An important additional finding is that there is an increasing concentration trend after the breakout of the recent international financial crisis, specially after the failure of Lehman Brothers.