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Working Paper
Impact of deposit rate deregulation in Hong Kong on the market value of commercial banks
This paper examines the effects of deposit rate deregulation in Hong Kong on the market value of banks. The release of the Consumer Council's Report in 1994 recommending interest rate deregulation is found to produce negative abnormal returns, while the announcement in 1995 terminating the deregulation program led to positive abnormal returns. Furthermore, news about resumption of interest rate deregulation in 1998 and the official announcement in 2000 to abolish the interest rate rules produced negative abnormal returns. The evidence suggests that Hong Kong banks earned rents from deposit ...
Journal Article
Risk and return of publicly held versus privately owned banks
The author divides bank holding companies (BHCs) into four size classes, then categorizes each class according to public or private ownership. He compares the performance and risk across bank size classes between 1986 and 2000 and in five-year windows therein. For the largest BHCs, returns on assets and operating costs do not depend on ownership, but for the smaller BHCs, returns on assets are lower and operating costs are higher for those that are publicly owned. Small public BHCs also hold more capital than do small private ones.
Journal Article
Financial Market Conditions during Monetary Tightening
The current round of federal funds rate increases is expected to reverse a historically large gap between the real funds rate and the neutral rate at the beginning of the tightening cycle. Financial markets have reacted faster and more strongly than in past monetary tightening cycles, in part because of this large gap and the Federal Reserve’s forward guidance. Historical experiences suggest financial conditions could tighten even more given the size of the gap.
Working Paper
The informativeness of stochastic frontier and programming frontier efficiency scores: Cost efficiency and other measures of bank holding company performance
This paper examines the properties of the X-inefficiencies in U.S. bank holding companies derived from both stochastic and linear programming frontiers. This examination allows the robustness of results across methods to be compared. While we find that calculated programming inefficiency scores are two to three times larger than those estimated using a stochastic frontier, the patterns of the scores across banks and time are similar, and there is a relatively high correlation of the rankings of banks' efficiencies under the two methods. However, when we examine the "informativeness" of the ...
Working Paper
The Transmission of Negative Nominal Interest Rates in Finland
Despite the implementation of negative nominal interest rates by several advanced economies in the last decade and the many papers that have been written about this novel policy tool, there is still much we do not know about the effectiveness of this instrument. The pass-through of negative policy rates to loan rates is one of the main points of contention. In this paper, we analyze the pass-through of the ECB’s changes in the deposit facility rate to mortgage rates in Finland between 2005 and 2020. We use monthly data and three different empirical methodologies: correlational event ...
Journal Article
Inflation expectations: how the market speaks
This Economic Letter discusses the structure of Treasury Inflation-Protected Security (TIPS) contracts, the development of the market in recent years, and the measure of inflation compensation derived from comparing TIPS yields to nominal yields.
Working Paper
The role of private placement debt issues in corporate finance
Private placement debt issues are more effective than public bonds in resolving information asymmetries and controlling moral hazard problems. Firms that issue only private placements (non-switchers) are found to have more information problems than firms that have access to the public bond market (switchers), and therefore are required to pay more for their private placements. Moreover, switchers switch to private placements when the financing situation involves material information asymmetry that is unsuitable for issuing public bonds. For general purposes financing, switchers switch to ...
Working Paper
Financial crisis and bank lending
This paper estimates the amount of tightening in bank commercial and industrial (C&I) loan rates during the financial crisis. After controlling for loan characteristics and bank fixed effects, as of 2010:Q1, the average C&I loan spread was 66 basis points or 23 percent above normal. From about 2005 to 2008, the loan spread averaged 23 basis points below normal. Thus, from the unusually loose lending conditions in 2007 to the much tighter conditions in 2010:Q1, the average loan spread increased by about 1 percentage point. I find that large and medium-sized banks tightened their loan rates ...
Journal Article
Banks’ Real Estate Exposure and Resilience
Real estate has hit record high prices and elevated valuations in some markets. Do bank lenders have sufficient capital to withstand a large price drop? While their portfolios have a similar concentration in real estate as they did before the global financial crisis, both underwriting standards and capitalization have improved significantly since then. Estimates using the Federal Reserve?s stress test scenarios suggest that, although a few small banks would be undercapitalized, the banking sector overall appears resilient enough to weather a steep decline in real estate prices.
Journal Article
Bank charters vs thrift charters