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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 ...
Working Paper
Financial contracting and the choice between private placement and publicly offered bonds
Private placement bonds have unique financial contracting in controlling borrower-lender agency conflicts due to direct monitoring and the relative ease of future renegotiation. Our data show that private placements are more likely to have restrictive covenants and are more likely to be issued by smaller and riskier borrowers. We find the determinants of bond yield spreads to be quite different between private placements and public issues, reflecting the different institutional arrangements between the two markets. Finally, in issuing bonds, we find that firms self-select the bond type to ...
Working Paper
The International Transmission of Shocks: Foreign Bank Branches in Hong Kong during Crises
The international transmission of shocks in the global financial system has always been an important issue for policy makers. Different types of foreign shocks have different effects and policy implications. In this paper, we examine the effects of the recent U.S. financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis on foreign bank branches in Hong Kong. Unlike the literature on global banking that studies a global bank?s foreign operations from a home country perspective, our analysis uses foreign bank branches in Hong Kong and has a distinct host country perspective, which would seem ...
Working Paper
Safe and sound banking, 20 years later: what was proposed and what has been adopted
In 1986, a task force of banking academics organized and sponsored by the American Bankers Association convened to examine the banking industry and the efficacy of its regulatory system. The group was charged with reviewing the problems of ensuring the safety and soundness of the banking system and evaluating a number of policy options to improve the efficiency, performance, and safety of the system by changing the structure of the deposit insurance system and the bank regulatory and supervisory process. The results of the work of the task force were published by the MIT Press as the book, ...
Working Paper
Testing the strong-form of market discipline: the effects of public market signals on bank risk
Under the strong-form of market discipline, publicly traded banks that have constantly available public market signals from their stock (and bond) prices would take less risk than non-publicly traded banks because counterparties, borrowers, and regulators could react to adverse public market signals against publicly traded banks. In comparing the credit risk, earnings risk, capitalization, and failure risk between publicly traded and non-publicly traded banks, the evidence in this paper rejects the strong-form of market discipline. In fact, the findings indicate that banking organizations ...
Working Paper
Tracking Financial Fragility
In constructing an indicator of financial fragility, the choice of which filter (or transformation) to apply to the data series that appear to trend in sample is often considered a technicality, but in fact turns out to matter a great deal. The fundamental assumption about the likely nature of observed trends in the data, for example, the ratio of credit to GDP, has direct effects on the measured gap or vulnerability. We discuss shortcomings of the most common filters used in the literature and policy circle, and propose a fairly simple and intuitive alternative - the local level filter. To ...
Working Paper
The 2007-09 financial crisis and bank opaqueness
Doubts about the accuracy with which outside investors can assess a banking firm?s value motivate many government interventions in the banking market. The recent financial crisis has reinforced concerns about the possibility that banks are unusually opaque. Yet the empirical evidence, thus far, is mixed. This paper examines the trading characteristics of bank shares over the period from January 1990 through September 2009. We find that bank share trading exhibits sharply different features before vs. during the crisis. Until mid-2007, large (NYSE-traded) banking firms appear to be no more ...
