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Working Paper
Foreign Investment, Regulatory Arbitrage, and the Risk of U.S. Banking Organizations
This study investigates the implications of cross-country differences in banking regulation and supervision for the international subsidiary locations and risk of U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs). We find that U.S. BHCs are more likely to operate subsidiaries in countries with weaker regulation and supervision and that such location decisions are associated with elevated BHC risk and higher contribution to systemic risk. The quality of BHCs? internal controls and risk management play an important role in these location choices and risk outcomes. Overall, our study suggests that U.S. banking ...
Discussion Paper
Coming to Terms with Operational Risk
The term ?operational risk? often evokes images of catastrophic events like hurricanes and earthquakes. For financial institutions, however, operational risk has a broader scope, encompassing losses related to fraud, rogue trading, product misrepresentation, computer and system failures, and cyberattacks, among other things. In this blog post, we discuss how operational risk has come into greater focus over the past two decades?to the point that it now accounts for more than a quarter of financial institutions? regulatory capital.
Working Paper
Operational Loss Recoveries and the Macroeconomic Environment: Evidence from the U.S. Banking Sector
Using supervisory data from large U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs), we document that operational loss recovery rates decrease in macroeconomic downturns. This procyclical relationship varies by business lines and loss event types and is robust to alternative data aggregations, macroeconomic measurement horizons and estimation methodologies. Further analysis shows that resource constraints faced by BHC risk management functions are a plausible explanation for these patterns. Our findings offer new evidence on how economic shocks transmit to banking industry losses with implications for risk ...
Working Paper
Climate Risks in the U.S. Banking Sector: Evidence from Operational Losses and Extreme Storms
Using supervisory data from large U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs), we document that BHCs suffer more operational losses during episodes of extreme storms. Among different operational loss types, losses due to external fraud, BHCs’ failure to meet obligations to clients and faulty business practices, damage to physical assets, and business disruption drive this relation. Event study estimations corroborate our baseline findings. We further show that BHCs with past exposure to extreme storms reduce operational losses from future exposure to storms. Overall, our findings provide new ...
Working Paper
Are the Largest Banking Organizations Operationally More Risky?
This study demonstrates that, among large U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs), the largest ones are exposed to more operational risk. Specifically, they have higher operational losses per dollar of total assets, a result largely driven by the BHCs' failure to meet professional obligations to clients and/or faulty product design. Operational risk at the largest U.S. institutions is also found to: (i) be particularly persistent, (ii) have a counter-cyclical component (higher losses occur during economic downturns) and (iii) materialize through more frequent tail-risk events. We illustrate two ...
Working Paper
Haste Makes Waste: Banking Organization Growth and Operational Risk
This study shows that banking organization growth is associated with higher operational losses per dollar of total assets and incidence of tail risks. Event studies using M&A activity and instrumental variable regressions provide consistent evidence. The relationship between banking organization growth and operational risk varies by loss event types and balance sheet categories. We demonstrate that higher growth predicts worse operational risk realizations during the global financial crisis. These findings have implications for bank performance, risk management and supervision in a ...