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Discussion Paper
Follow That Money! How Global Banks Manage Liquidity Globally
Banks increasingly move money around the world. Over the last thirty years, gross international claims of banks from all countries have grown ten-fold, reaching a peak of about $25 trillion in 2007 (see chart below). Such global banking flows have been much in the news recently, sometimes depicted as a key culprit of the transmission around the globe of the shocks following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, and more recently the European sovereign debt crisis. The discourse in the regulatory arena seems to share this sentiment, with a bias towards curbing some of the global banking activity ...
Report
Resolving “Too Big to Fail”
Using a synthetic control research design, we find that ?living will? regulation increases a bank?s annual cost of capital by 22 basis points, or 10 percent of total funding costs. This effect is stronger in banks that were measured as systemically important before the regulation?s announcement. We interpret our findings as a reduction in ?too big to fail? subsidies. The size of this effect is large: a back-of-the-envelope calculation implies a subsidy reduction of $42 billion annually. The impact on equity costs drives the main effect. The impact on deposit costs is statistically ...
Working Paper
Banking market structure, financial dependence and growth: international evidence from industry data
This paper explores the empirical relevance of banking market structure on growth. There is substantial evidence of a positive relationship between the level of development of the banking sector of an economy and its long-run output growth. Little is known, however, about the role played by the market structure of the banking sector on the dynamics of capital accumulation. This paper provides evidence that bank concentration promotes the growth of those industrial sectors that are more in need of external finance by facilitating credit access to younger firms. However, we also find evidence ...
Report
Globalized banks: lending to emerging markets in the crisis
As banking has become more globalized, so too have the consequences of shocks originating in home and host markets. Global banks can provide liquidity and risk-sharing opportunities to the host market in the event of adverse host-country shocks, but they can also have profound effects across international markets. Indeed, global banks played a significant role in the transmission of the current crisis to emerging-market economies. Flows between global banks and emerging markets include both cross-border lending, which has long been recognized as responding significantly to shocks at home or ...
Report
Non-Bank Financial Institutions and Banks’ Fire-Sale Vulnerabilities
Banks carry significant exposures to nonbanks from direct dealings, but they can also be exposed, indirectly, through losses in asset values resulting from fire-sale events. We assess the vulnerability of U.S. banks to fire sales potentially originating from any of twelve separate nonbank segments and identify network-like externalities driven by the interconnectedness across nonbank types in terms of asset holdings. We document that such network externalities can contribute to very large multiples of an original fire sale, thus suggesting that conventional assessments of fire-sale ...
Report
Credit market competition and the nature of firms
Empirical studies show that competition in the credit markets has important effects on the entry and growth of firms in nonfinancial industries. This paper explores the hypothesis that the availability of credit at the time of a firm's founding has a profound effect on that firm's nature. I conjecture that in times when financial capital is difficult to obtain, firms will need to be built as relatively solid organizations. However, in an environment of easily available financial capital, firms can be constituted with an intrinsically weaker structure. To test this conjecture, I use ...
Journal Article
Entry and competition in highly concentrated banking markets
This article studies conditions of entry and competitive conduct in highly concentrated banking markets. The author estimates the minimum market size at which a second bank, a third, a fourth, and so on, can enter and maintain long-run profitability. The results suggest no evidence of cartel-like behavior, where banks collude and maximize joint monopoly profits, even in markets with only two or three banks. The results are more consistent with the competitive conduct predicted by models of oligopolistic behavior.
Report
Follow the money: quantifying domestic effects of foreign bank shocks in the Great Recession
Foreign banks pulled significant funding from their U.S. branches during the Great Recession. We estimate that the average-sized branch experienced a 12 percent net internal fund ?withdrawal,? with the fund transfer disproportionately bigger for larger branches. This internal shock to the balance sheets of U.S. branches of foreign banks had sizable effects on their lending. On average, for each dollar of funds transferred internally to the parent, branches decreased lending supply by about forty to fifty cents. However, the extent of the lending effects was very different across branches, ...
Report
Shadow bank monitoring
We provide a framework for monitoring the shadow banking system. The shadow banking system consists of a web of specialized financial institutions that conduct credit, maturity, and liquidity transformation without direct, explicit access to public backstops. The lack of such access to sources of government liquidity and credit backstops makes shadow banks inherently fragile. Shadow banking activities are often intertwined with core regulated institutions such as bank holding companies, security brokers and dealers, and insurance companies. These interconnections of shadow banks with other ...
Working Paper
The role of credit market competition on lending strategies and on capital accumulation
This paper examines the role of credit market competition in the dynamic of capital accumulation. It is shown that the lending relationship problem which seems to characterize competitive credit markets can have negative repercussions for capital accumulation. In contrast, monopoly power in banking can be beneficial for growth. A monopolist bank may lower the equilibrium quantity of credit, but it allows a better allocation of credit supply. This result reconciles with the available empirical evidence and suggests a positive role for monopoly power in banking, especially for developing ...