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Discussion Paper
2nd Annual International Roles of the U.S. Dollar Conference
The U.S. dollar plays a central role in the global economy. In addition to being the most widely used currency in foreign exchange transactions, it represents the largest share in official reserves, international debt securities and loans, cross-border payments, and trade invoicing.
Working Paper
Trade Uncertainty and U.S. Bank Lending
This paper uses U.S. credit register data and the 2018–19 Trade War to study the effects of uncertainty on domestic credit supply. Exploiting differences in banks' ex-ante exposure to trade uncertainty, we find that increased uncertainty is associated with a broad lending contraction across their customer firms. This result is consistent with banks responding to uncertainty with wait-and-see behaviors, where more exposed banks curtail risky exposures, reduce loan maturities, and adjust loan supply along both intensive and extensive margins. The lending contraction is larger for more ...
Working Paper
Changes in Prudential Policy Instruments ---- A New Cross-Country Database
This paper documents the features of a new database that focuses on changes in the intensity in the usage of several widely used prudential tools, taking into account both macro-prudential and microprudential objectives. The database coverage is broad, spanning 64 countries, and with quarterly data for the period 2000Q1 through 2014Q4. The five types of prudential instruments in the database are: capital buffers, interbank exposure limits, concentration limits, loan to value (LTV) ratio limits, and reserve requirements. A total of nine prudential tools are constructed since some useful ...
Working Paper
Cross-border bank acquisitions: Is there a performance effect?
This paper uses a unique database that includes deal and bank balance sheet information for 220 cross-border acquisitions between 1994 and 2003 to analyze the characteristics and performance effects of international takeovers on target banks. A discrete choice estimation shows that banks are more likely to get acquired in a cross-border deal if they are large, bad performers, in a small country, and when the banking sector is concentrated. Post-acquisition performance for target banks does not improve in the first two years relative to domestically-owned financial institutions. This result is ...
Working Paper
Sovereign credit risk, banks' government support, and bank stock returns around the world
We explore the joint effect of expected government support to banks and changes in sovereign credit ratings on bank stock returns using data for banks in 37 countries between 1995 and 2011. We find that sovereign credit rating downgrades have a large negative effect on bank stock returns for those banks that are expected to receive stronger support from their governments. This result is stronger for banks in advanced economies where governments are better-positioned to provide that support. Our results suggest that stock market investors perceive sovereigns and domestic banks as markedly ...
Report
Liquidity risk and U.S. bank lending at home and abroad
While the balance sheet structure of U.S. banks influences how they respond to liquidity risks, the mechanisms for the effects on and consequences for lending vary widely across banks. We demonstrate fundamental differences across banks without foreign affiliates versus those with foreign affiliates. Among the nonglobal banks (those without a foreign affiliate), cross-sectional differences in response to liquidity risk depend on the banks? shares of core deposit funding. By contrast, differences across global banks (those with foreign affiliates) are associated with ex ante liquidity ...
Working Paper
U.S. Banks and Global Liquidity
We characterize how U.S. global systemically important banks (GSIBs) supply short-term dollar liquidity in repo and foreign exchange swap markets in the post-Global Financial Crisis regulatory environment and serve as the "lenders-of-second-to-last-resort". Using daily supervisory bank balance sheet information, we find that U.S. GSIBs modestly increase their dollar liquidity provision in response to dollar funding shortages, particularly at period-ends, when the U.S. Treasury General Account balance increases, and during the balance sheet taper of the Federal Reserve. The increase in the ...
Working Paper
Owe a Bank Millions, the Bank Has a Problem: Credit Concentration in Bad Times
How does a bank react when a substantial share of its borrowers suffer a large negative shock? To answer this question we exploit the 2014 collapse of energy prices using the universe of Mexican commercial bank loans. We show that, after the drop in energy prices, banks exposed to the energy sector increased their exposure to these borrowers even more, relaxing credit margins to their larger debtors in the sector. An increase of one standard deviation in a bank's ex-ante exposure to the energy sector increased the loan volume to borrowers in the sector by 18 percent and reduced interest rates ...