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Speech
The complexity of culture reform in finance: remarks at the 4th Annual Culture and Conduct Forum for the Financial Services Industry, London
Remarks at the 4th Annual Culture and Conduct Forum for the Financial Services Industry, London.
Working Paper
Complexity of Global Banks and their Foreign Operation in Hong Kong
This paper studies the relation between the complexity of global banking organizations and their foreign banking operations (FBOs) in Hong Kong. Our empirical evidence indicates that the complexity of the parent company has significant effects on their Hong Kong branch?s business model, liquidity management, risk-taking, and profitability. The more complex the global banking organizations, their Hong Kong FBOs are more likely to derive a larger share of revenues from fee-based activities, and incur a higher cost of production despite enjoying a funding cost advantage. Notwithstanding the FBOs ...
Speech
More resilient, better managed, less complex: strengthening FMUs and linkages in the system
Remarks at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association Conference, Boca Raton, Florida
Report
Organizational complexity and balance sheet management in global banks
Banks have progressively evolved from being standalone institutions to being subsidiaries of increasingly complex financial conglomerates. We conjecture and provide evidence that the organizational complexity of the family of a bank is a fundamental driver of the business model of the bank itself, as reflected in the management of the bank?s own balance sheet. Using micro-data on global banks with branch operations in the United States, we show that branches of conglomerates in more complex families have a markedly lower lending sensitivity to funding shocks. The balance sheet management ...
Report
Complexity in large U.S. banks
While both size and complexity are important for the largest U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs), specific types of complexity and their patterns across banks are not well understood. We introduce a range of measures of organizational, business, and geographic complexity. Comparing 2007 with 2017, we show that large U.S. BHCs remain very complex, with some declines along organizational and geographical complexity dimensions. The numbers of legal entities within some large BHCs have fallen. By contrast, the multiple industries spanned by legal entities within the BHCs have shifted more than ...
Discussion Paper
Peeling the Onion: A Structural View of U.S. Bank Holding Companies
When market observers talk about a “bank,” they are generally not referring to a single legal entity. Instead, large domestic banking organizations are almost always organized according to a bank holding company (BHC) structure, in which a U.S. parent holding company controls up to several thousand separate subsidiaries. This hierarchy of controlled entities generally includes domestic commercial banks primarily focused on lending and deposit-taking as well as a range of nonbanking and foreign firms engaged in a diverse set of business activities, such as securities dealing and ...
Report
Is size everything?
We examine sources of systemic risk (threshold size, complexity, and interconnectedness) with factors constructed from equity returns of large financial firms, after accounting for standard risk factors. From the factor loadings and factor returns, we estimate the implicit government subsidy for each systemic risk measure, and find that, from 1963 to 2006, only our big-versus-huge threshold size factor, TSIZE, implies a positive implicit subsidy on average. Further, pre-2007 TSIZE-implied subsidies predict the Federal Reserve?s liquidity facility loans and the Treasury?s TARP loans during the ...